Ill 



Mill 



.vAh 



11111 

yillli 



TAetaphysigs 






JRSSsSSffSSSSSSS^ 



M .J.BAR 



^» x ill 

(■NT 







LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

"R^oi " 

©jfjqt... ©opijrtg^t f c. 

Shelf a.B.J2 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



PEACTICAL METAPHYSICS; 



OK, 



THE TBTJE METHOD OE HEALING. 



*? 



B 



BY 



M. J. BARNETT. 



&d& 



X MAV31^889"' * ' 



H. H. CARTER & KARRICK, 
No. 3 Beacon Street. 

1889. 

O"0 



^ 
*# 



COPTKIGHT, 1889, 

Bt M. J. BARNETT. 



All Rights Reserved. 



J. S. Cushing & Co., Printers, Boston. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTEB PAGE 

I. The Fountain of all Life 7 

II. Disease only in Mind 10 

III. Denial a Power 19 

IV. Faith the Entrance into Life * . 25 

V. Heredity 35 

VI. Overcoming Evil with Good 44 

VII. Knowledge a Necessity 51 

VIII. Spiritual Telegraphy 56 

IX. Material Remedies a Failure 71 

X. Discord among Schools 79 



PREFACE. 



" For I long to see you, that I may impart unto you some spirit- 
ual gift, to the end ye may be established." — Rom. 1 : 11. 

To present an old truth in a new form is a privilege 
cheerfully accorded to all. Truth may assume as many 
forms as there are varieties of intelligence to receive it. 

The fact that the seven notes in music have been 
presented to us in thousands of combinations, by dif- 
ferent orders of genius, does not deter us from forming 
still other combinations with the hope of touching 
some chord in the human heart hitherto untouched, or 
of reaching some intelligence hitherto unreached. 

Every demand creates a supply. 

We do not need to apologize for saying again what 
has already been so well said. 

Jesus did not hesitate to offer us truths that had for 
ages been embodied in the literature of the East. He 
did not hesitate to give us the Pater Noster as a model 
of prayer, because Hillel had already offered it to the 
world before he came. He did not consider it deroga- 
tory to his teachings to enrich them with literal quota- 
tions from the Talmud and other sacred books. The 
whole beautiful life of Jesus was a manifestation of 
truth, but he did not pretend to create truth. Truth 
cannot be created. It has always existed. It is here 



6 PBEFACE. 

and now to every one of us. If our spiritual vision is 
not yet sufficiently developed to behold it readily, we 
must grope for it and find it as best we can, always 
helping one another in the search. 

The wave of spiritual truth that is now sweeping 
over the western world is bringing refreshment and 
vitality to thousands of tender and living souls, which, 
like the green sapling in the tempest, yield to its 
quickening force. Those, however, who stubbornly 
deny and defy it, will be only bruised in the conflict, 
as the dead tree is snapped in twain by the rushing 
wind. 

Those of you who are dead, wake up to life ! Life is 
within you. Summon it forth ! The cry of " Lazarus, 
come forth " is ringing in the air to-day as clearly as it 
was eighteen hundred years ago. The Lazarus, the real 
being, that appears dead but is yet alive, can come 
forth at the sacred summons. The divine spark that 
is surely within you can kindle into a flame that shall 
vivify your whole being. If you have not yet discov- 
ered that spark within yourselves, search for it with all 
diligence, and your search will surely not be in vain. 

If during the perusal of the following pages certain 
inquiries should arise in the mind of the reader, we 
should be happy to receive them, in the hope of being 
sufficiently illumined from the Source of all Light, to 
be enabled to reply to them, weaving the reply into the 
texture of our next work. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE FOUNTAIN OF ALL LIFE. 

" For with thee is the fountain of life." — Ps. 36 : 9. 

Metaphysics, as the root of the word implies, is the 
science of that something in us which is beyond the 
physical. Metaphysics has too commonly been re- 
garded as dry speculation concerning the working of 
mind, and held in reserve as the monopoly of polite 
scholarship, and in no way referable to practical, every- 
day life. No knowledge is valuable that is not practi- 
cal. Nothing is more practical than real metaphysics, 
which teaches the true relation of that something in us 
beyond the physical — the immortal part of us — to 
God, who created us, and to the universe in which we 
are placed. As we are every moment the creature 
of God, we are every moment in need of the knowl- 
edge of our true relation to him. As we are every 
moment in the universe, we are every moment in need 
of the teaching that enables us to adjust ourselves to 
that universe. 

Metaphysics is rightly defined to be the science of 
mind over matter. It teaches the mind to assume its 
rightful province in dominion over matter. The main- 
tenance of this true order of life has, in all ages of the 
world, been proved to result in sanity of mind and 



8 PEACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OR, 

body. The great question, then, is how to maintain this 
divinely established order of our being. It is in no 
instance done without watching and working, even 
if accomplished — as it may be — without suffering. 
With spirit in full command of its servant matter, 
we are in that condition which brings us into true 
relations with the Eternal Being, we are in that atti- 
tude which opens us to the influx of the all-pervading 
life-principle. 

The existence of an ever-present life-principle is 
universally acknowledged. It is one and the same 
under whatever name it may be designated ; whether it 
be the " Nature " of the materialists, or the " Od " of 
Baron Reichenbach, or the " Vril" of Bulwer-Lytton, 
or the " Divine Influx from the Lord" of Emanuel Swe- 
denborg, or the "AJcasa" of the Adept Brotherhood of 
India, or any one of that list of names in the book of 
Hermes : " The Divine Thought" " The Celestial Ocean" 
" The Ether flowing from East to West" " The Breath 
of the Father" " The Life-giving Principle" " The Holy 
Ghost" 

All life, in whatever kingdom it may be found, is 
sustained from this universal fountain so variously 
designated ; and if at any time matter ceases to imbibe 
its due supply, it becomes inert and dead. Matter has 
no life in itself. Our material body is alive, as we say, 
just in proportion to its capability of receiving from 
this fountain of life, and it is capable of receiving from 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 9 

this fountain of life just in proportion as it is dominated 
by that something in us beyond the physical, which 
in its divine essence is called soul and in its dual mani- 
festation is called mind and spirit, the intellect and the 
affections, the male and female principles. 

How comforting it should be to think that the power 
to be wholly alive is all within ourselves, that we can 
make slight effort and have partial health, or we can 
put forth all our energy and enjoy mental and physical 
health in its fulness and perfection. 

There is no time when, there is no place in which, 
this life-principle may not be found. There are only 
conditions in us which open us to it, or close us against 
it. It is the atmosphere of the soul, as the air we inhale 
into our lungs is the atmosphere of the body. It per- 
meates every crevice and every tissue of our souls, as 
the physical atmosphere permeates every crevice and 
every tissue of our bodies, if we permit it to do so. It 
is above us. It is below us. It surrounds us and 
presses in upon us on every side. It is even eager to 
be admitted. It is freighted with divine love, with 
divine intention to bless and to heal, if we will only 
allow it to do so. 

We have first to believe that this power exists, and 
then with the turning of the mind towards it grows a 
faith in its saving efficacy, which faith increases with 
the working of the power, until it becomes that positive 
knowledge which opens wide the portals of the soul 
and makes its atmosphere one with the universal ether. 



10 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OR, 



CHAPTER II. 

DISEASE ONLY IN MIND. 

" Not that which goeth into the mouth ; but that which cometh 
out of the mouth, this defileth a man." — Matt. 15 : 11. 

Only that which is within us, which is in the mind 
or in the heart, can harm us. No external thing can 
gain a hold upon us unless it find some point of affinity 
within us. All defilement, all disease, arises from 
within. 

Before you can practically set to work to make your 
body whole by healing the mind, you must at least 
listen to the great truth that disease originates in mind. 
All are willing to admit that some diseases are created 
by a condition of mind, but many assert that other dis- 
eases are wholly physical ; that they are conditions of 
body irrespective of mind. In what are usually termed 
nervous ailments, even the materialist can trace the 
working of metaphysical law, for it lies so near the 
surface. But the deep and complex causes in mind 
which just as surely produce the whole list of so-called 
physical ailments, he cannot discern, for they are further 
below the surface than his science is able to explore. 

We say you must listen to the truth that disease 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 11 

originates in mind; for if you are not yet opened to 
spiritual things, you cannot be expected to do more at 
first than give truth an unprejudiced hearing. You 
cannot be expected to be convinced of any truth 
through the intelligence of another person. Spiritual 
truth must come to you through your own spiritual 
perception, as intellectual truth must come to you 
through your own intellect. It is the office of the 
practical teacher to enable you to gain a knowledge of 
truth by your own practice, and not by the practice of 
another person. But in order to begin the practice of 
metaphysics rightly, you must start on at least the sup- 
position that in mind is the cause of all effect in matter, 
not necessarily your mind, but some mind or minds. 
You must, therefore, direct your healing energy exclu- 
sively to mind, to the entire ignoring of matter. You 
must regard yourself as only a spiritual being. 

Our great, ideal teacher, Jesus, in his marvellous 
works in healing, never alluded to the diseased body of 
the afflicted. He told them their sins were forgiven 
them ; that their faith had made them whole. He bade 
them go and sin no more. He commanded them to 
arise, to be whole; but never do we read of his making 
an examination of their physical body, or calling atten- 
tion to the outward manifestation of the error which he 
considered within them. He addressed only the soul 
within. We have but to follow his pure and explicit 
example. 



12 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OR, 

You may say it all sounds very well as theory, but we 
have had enough of theories. They do nothing for us. 

If theories are not put in practice, they certainly can 
do nothing for you. We confess that in metaphysics, 
as in many other sciences, the wheat of truth is too often 
choked up with tares of mysticism and verbosity. 
There are largely circulated works on the old science 
of metaphysics, in which one is obliged to seek for gems 
of truth amid heaps of rubbish, works in which one 
golden sentence is found on a page, the remaining part 
of which is an insult to any rational understanding, 
because it is totally devoid of rationality. But that 
these works live in spite of their rubbish is proof that 
they live because of the little truth there is in them. 
" A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump." 

We have no need of whole volumes to prove that 
there is no such thing as matter in existence, for matter 
certainly does (as the word implies) exist, or stand out, 
on the material plane as the lowest or ultimate mani- 
festation of spirit. It is useless to say that we have no 
body. At this moment we have a material body. It is 
not (according to Material Science) in any one of its 
particles the same body we had seven years ago, but it 
is. nevertheless a body. It is real while it lasts. A 
shadow is real while it lasts, real as an effect. Our 
body, which is momentarily changing, is as real as a 
shadow. If we feel cold and uncomfortable standing in 
the shadow of a large building, the mere assertion that 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 13 

there is no shadow there, will not, so long as we believe 
there is one, make us feel warm. But if we can take 
the higher ground that while the shadow as an effect, 
as an appearance, does exist, yet we are in so positive a 
condition that we can hold our own against it, that we 
can be indifferent as to whether we are in shadow or 
in sunshine, then, relatively, the shadow will not exist. 
It will not exist for us. 

Our material body is a shadow of our soul, as the 
whole material universe is a shadow of the spiritual 
realm. 

The Persian book of Shet, in harmony with Sweden- 
borg's Science of Correspondences, as well as with mod- 
ern Greek philosophies, says : " Whatever is on earth is 
the resemblance and shadow of something that is in the 
sphere; while that resplendent thing remaineth in an 
unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. 
But when the resplendent one removeth far from its 
shadow, life removeth from the latter to a distance." 

These sentiments, whether expressed in the language 
of the Persians, or that of the Greeks, or in the Latin 
of old English Literature, are the sentiments of true 
metaphysics. When the spiritual world removes itself 
from us, as we say, — just as we say the sun leaves us r 
or God forsakes us, when it is only we who change — 
then life is removed from us. 

The shadow depends for its existence and form upon 
the more substantial object that casts that shadow and 



14 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OR, 

the light back of the object. Material science does not 
teach us to make an examination of the ever-shifting 
shadow in order to learn the properties of the object 
that projects the shadow. Material science in search 
for such truth would ignore the shadow altogether. 
Much more should spiritual science, in its search for 
causation, ignore the existence of the soul's shadow, 
the transient body. 

As we regard the shadow of the style on the face of 
a sundial, merely as an index of the sun's position with 
relation to that style, so should we regard the body, 
only as an index of spiritual light with relation to us. 

Material science recognizes the fact that when our body 
is in a state of perfect health we are not conscious of a 
body. But material science asserts that in order to arrive 
at that state of unconsciousness, the body must first be in 
a condition of perfect health, while spiritual science 
reverses the assertion, and says that the body cannot be 
in a state of perfect health until we have arrived at a 
condition of unconsciousness of its existence. If we 
take care of the soul, the body will take care of itself. 
If we fill the mind with truth, the body will express 
that truth. All truth is beautiful. It is a universal 
conception that Jesus, that Buddha, that all the great 
spiritual lights of the world have been beautiful in 
body as well as in soul. All unsightliness of body 
originates in disease as a second cause. Disease is an in- 
dex of a lack of spiritual light resulting in sin or weak- 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 15 

ness, or ignorance, either in ourselves or some other 
mind or minds that dominate us. 

Some very upright, conscientious and even religious 
people will say that they live up to their highest light, 
and yet they are ill. Yes ; but their highest light may 
be darkness. 

It is difficult for us to realize how little we are our- 
selves, and how much we are made up of the beliefs 
and opinions of others. The majority of the world be- 
lieve, without question, what they have been taught to 
believe. It is only the exceptional mind that puts 
aside inherited and ingrafted belief and finds out truth 
for itself. 

Medical science, and even religion, has for ages taught 
us that disease of body is a necessity of our mortal 
condition, and we are even told that it is sent by God 
as a necessary part of our development and discipline ; 
when the truth is, that it is wholly our own creation. 
We certainly do need it as a discipline when we are in 
a condition to have it. But if we are in such a condi- 
tion now, let us not remain in it a moment longer. 
Let us at once learn the lesson taught us in this inevi- 
table result of error, and cast out the error. There 
can be no effect where there is no cause. 

So long as your child is in a condition to break the 
rules of his school, he is in a condition to need the 
suffering his transgression entails on him. But you do 
not tell him that punishment is a necessary part of his 



16 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS ; OK, 

education, and that it is necessary for him to be disobe- 
dient in order to have the suffering which benefits him. 
You feel sure that if he obeys the rules he not only 
will not need to suffer, but that there will be no cause 
for his suffering, and therefore he cannot have the suf- 
fering. 

If disease in us is the result of our error, if it is our 
own work, how can we undo that work and begin anew 
on a metaphysical basis. Can we carry these metaphys- 
ical theories into practice? 

We can do so. We can begin to-day to live meta- 
physics. 

You need not fear that you are so good that you will 
not be able to find your error. You need not fear that 
you will find nothing to correct in yourself; for after 
the intelligent introspection of an hour, you will be 
aghast at the host of errors, in the form of weaknesses 
and indigencies — to speak of nothing worse — that 
you will bring to the front. If you think you are all 
right within, when you have an ailment without, you 
must be blind indeed. Egotism has destroyed your 
visiom A tree is known by its fruit. 

There is, perhaps, no universal error which seems so 
little like an error as an opinion regarding weather and 
climate. Pinching and poverty are suffered, large for- 
tunes are spent, and valuable time is sacrificed, in order 
to avoid certain climates that are believed to be inju- 
rious, and gain certain other climates that are believed 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 17 

to be beneficial, when the truth regarding it is, that you 
have all climates within yourself. This bondage to 
atmospheric changes and conditions is a troublesome 
and expensive kind of slavery. A civil war is needed 
to blot it out of existence, a war within your own 
boundaries, a war at home, and with weapons that you 
have within yourself. 

If it is only a matter of pleasure, and if duty does 
not conflict with that pleasure, there is certainly no 
harm in seeking the climate you like best. But do not 
imagine for a moment that a certain kind of climate is 
a necessity for you. 

If duty, or even expediency, places you in a climate 
that you believe to be injurious to your health, contra- 
dict that belief at once. Remain in that climate and 
protect yourself in truth. Experience will then dem- 
onstrate to you (as it has to us) the fact that power 
over the elements is within yourself, and you will not 
run away to have your fighting to do another day, but 
you will stay and conquer, and you will enjoy the fruit 
of your great conquest over error more than you could 
possibly enjoy the most delightful climate on earth. 

If you are a weather slave, work for your freedom ! 
If the fear of climate is the dragon that meets you on 
the threshold of your introspective chamber, seize it at 
once, and trample it under your feet ! 

We are equal to all the inevitable conditions in which 
we are placed. Our backs are fitted to the burdens 



18 PBACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OK, 

that God has placed upon them. We will say more : if 
not even duty, but convenience or pleasure, calls us to 
a harsh climate, then we can endure a harsh climate and 
receive no harm, if we protect ourselves in truth. God 
does not intend us to be in bondage to these material 
things. The power of good can always protect us 
against evil. 

If, for example, you fear dampness and believe that 
you cannot expose yourself to it without injurious re- 
sults, then combat that fear at once. It is not the 
dampness but the belief in your mind that injures you. 
Dress yourself comfortably and protect yourself sen- 
sibly, and go out for a walk in the dampness or rain. 
If you have an object, and can be of service to some 
one by going, so much the better, for benevolence is a 
servant of metaphysics. Every moment of your walk 
deny, not that bad weather exists, but that it can pos- 
sibly harm you. It is an error to suppose that it can 
do so. It can do so only as you allow it to do so. 
Deny this error again and again, if need be, until it 
finally retires, as it certainly will do, and you are 
troubled with it no more. 

We know of a case in which a serious and chronic 
fear of dampness was overcome in two months. Now 
two months may not be required in your case, for spirit 
acknowledges no limitation in time. You may, perhaps, 
conquer the error in two days. But if more time is 
needed, do not be discouraged. Know that the limita- 
tion is in yourself and not in the power of truth. 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 19 



CHAPTER III. 

DENIAL A POWER. 

" The evil bow before the good." — Prov. 14 : 19. 

Evil is always cowardly. Assert your rightful 
supremacy over evil, and it will cringe before you. If 
evil arrogates to itself the right of master, it is always 
because the true master is absent. Let the master 
return and deny the claim of the usurper. Good is the 
only supreme sovereign. 

There are those who conscientiously object to deny- 
ing what they say they know to be true. It is for you 
to realize that evil is true only in proportion as you 
make it true, and false in proportion as you make it 
false. 

It is not necessary to deny that evil and disease exist. 
They certainly do exist as an effect, on the outward 
plane. But they find no lodgement in the inmost and 
eternal soul, the pure emanation from the All Perfect 
Being. If disease exists, it is no part of our real self. 
If you have a wart or a tumor, you do not consider it, a 
necessary part of your body, but you regard it as some- 
thing that has been added by an interference with the 
working of natural law. You never saw a statue or 



20 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OR, 

any model of the human body with a tubercle included 
as a necessary part of that body. Disease has no more 
place in the material body as it was created, than sin 
has in the soul as it proceeded from its pure source. 
Both sin and disease are something added to our orig- 
inal self by an interference with the working of fixed 
law, producing an inharmony between us and God's 
established order. Then deny them both as real eternal 
conditions. Do not permit them to exist. Above all, 
at any time and every time deny the power of disease 
to harm you. 

The most conscientious mother does not hesitate to 
say to her child who has just had a severe fall : " Get 
up, my son ! Be brave ! You are not hurt. It is well 
now. There is nothing the matter." She does not tell 
him that he did not fall, but endeavors to impress upon 
him the fact that if he thinks nothing about it, he will 
not be harmed. The child swallows his sobs, dries his 
tears, and runs to his play again. Do you feel that the 
mother has been untruthful ? There is a swelling upon 
the child's forehead, and you can see it across the room. 
What of that ? The pain has been driven out of his 
mind where alone it existed, and the lump upon his 
forehead is of no consequence whatever. But if you 
desire to increase that lump, you have only to place your 
mind upon it, and the child's in addition perhaps, to 
create an inflammation that will last him for many a day. 

Mere belief in the power of disease is an error. Stout 



THE TKUE METHOD OF HEALING. 21 

and sincere denial of an error weakens its power. It is 
the greater attacking the lesser, and that lesser must 
always retire maimed if not at once destroyed. 

The denial of truth cannot weaken its power. The 
greater can always hold its own against the lesser. If 
truth in you seems to give way to error, it is because 
you have not a firm hold upon truth. Truth does not 
give way ; it is you that give way. When truth becomes 
a knowledge to you, when it is in your possession, it will 
hold its own against all attack. If a person who stood 
beside you as you looked upon a glorious sunset should 
tell you that there was no such thing as color, you 
would simply feel sure that he was blind, or at least 
color-blind. Your faith in the existence of color would 
not be shaken ; you would not only believe, but you 
would know that color existed. You may believe what 
is false, but you can know only what is true. Knowl- 
edge stands on the rock of truth and cannot be shaken. 
Mere belief is built upon the sand, which at any moment 
may shift and bring the feeble structure down in ruins. 
You may believe one thing to-day and its opposite to- 
morrow, but that which you know, is truth. It is un- 
changeable. It is yours forever. Deny evil, and, having 
nothing to stand upon, it will fall. 

Mere words of denial do not possess the desired effi- 
cacy. If you deny the power of an ailment in a tame, 
mechanical way, with no spirit or faith in the power of 
denial, if you employ your words as a sort of magical 



22 PEACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OK, 

incantation expected to operate upon certain occult 
forces, without your co-operation, you may as well say 
nothing and let the evil have its way unmolested. But 
the very energy that is put forth in earnest denial of 
error is a power that instantly begins the work of 
destroying that error. It expresses your desire, and 
paints upon the mind the perfect image that your body 
will as a natural sequence copy. If you perceive 
little result in one denial, deny again and again, if need 
be. Reiteration is a power. 

You have perhaps heard that a person may tell a 
falsehood so many times that at last he believes it him- 
self. Now, if a falsehood may be thus impressed upon 
the mind, why may not also a truth, to the same degree ? 
It may, to the same degree and to a thousand times 
greater degree. The power of truth always has been, 
is now, and always will be, a thousand times more than 
a match for falsehood. The powers of light are greater 
than the powers of darkness. The hosts of heaven out- 
number the feeble ranks of hell. If you have joined 
the army of truth, victory is already yours. Raise high 
your colors and march on ! 

To make denial practical, suppose that at this moment 
you feel that you have a severe headache, then vigor- 
ously deny its power over you. Say, with the child 
who was offered medicine that he considered worse than 
his ailment, that you have it, but it does not hurt. It 
cannot harm you if you do not permit it to do so. 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 23 

Argue away all cause for such a result. Make the 
statement that you are in a harmonious condition of 
mind and equal to the duty of the hour, whatever it 
may be, and with that statement is presented to you an 
image of yourself as you can be and will be, or, perhaps, 
there comes back upon you from the past a recollection 
of yourself at your best, and with that image, its cor- 
responding condition of mind returns upon you. How 
many joys and sorrows of the past we live over again ! 
Why not utilize this tendency of human nature and 
turn it to good instead of evil account. Never live over 
your sorrows. But if your grip upon truth will not 
sustain you in the present without a backward look, 
then revert to some past joy, or some moment of perfect 
health or happiness, and use it as a crutch until you can 
stand alone in the present, firm and tranquil on a foun- 
dation of truth. 

We know of an old man who always feels strong 
when he thinks of a certain day in his youth in which 
he saved a child from drowning. We tell him that if 
his mind rmist travel backward, then let it rest upon 
that day. 

We know of a lady who always feels ill when she 
thinks of the day in which she refused to acknowledge 
the acquaintance of a friend for fear of harm to her- 
self. We tell her never to think of that day again. 
Like the cowardly disciple Peter, she has wept over 
her error, and, like him, she can atone for it by noble 



24 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OK, 

living and noble teaching. She learned her lesson in 
her suffering, and now let her close the book forever. 

Let the dead past bury its dead. All the good of 
your past is living in the present; it has lost but its 
worn-out shells, and is re-embodied in your words and 
deeds of to-day. Do not go back and rake up the 
corpses and skeletons that you have dropped along the 
road. You carry everything along with you that is 
worth carrying, and that without any effort on your 
part. Live in to-day, and live only in the good of to- 
day, denying the evil and dropping it along the way as 
you pass on. 

Continue to employ over error the power of denial, 
until the mere quiet assertion that God is life and you 
are one with God sustains your calm soul in all up- 
rightness. 

This condition of peace, of rest in the Eternal, will 
come after the fighting is over. After the storm a calm. 
After the battle peace. Peace earned by successful 
warfare with evil rests upon a perfected faith which 
has become knowledge. 



THE TBUE METHOD OF HEALING. 25 



CHAPTER IV. 

FAITH THE ENTRANCE INTO LIFE. 

" According to your faith be it unto you." — Matt. 9 : 29. 

Faith takes you by the hand and opens to you the 
sanctuary of truth. 

There is no truth so lofty that it cannot be put in 
practice if firmly enough believed in. But our trust in 
it must be boundless. It must become incorporated 
into our being. It must become a part of our real self. 
Our belief in a material remedy is not supposed to 
cure disease unless it leads us to procure that remedy 
and appropriate it, and incorporate it into our own 
bodies. 

We naturally desire that which we believe to be 
good. A belief in good attracts us to good. If we 
pursue evil, it is because we mistake it for good. It 
has been well said that all evil arises from ignorance, 
from a misconception of truth. A firm belief in the 
supremacy of good over evil would lead us to forsake 
evil and cling to only good. Who would refuse to go 
on board a sea-worthy vessel to embark on a sinking 
ship? Mere worldly policy would guide us better than 
that. In crossjng a stream we seek the bridge that 



26 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OR, 

will carry us over, and not the one that will break 
under our tread and let us down into the current. 
When we once see that good is the all in all, we must 
place our faith in it. 

Reason and nature, without Bibles, teach the su- 
premacy of good over evil. They teach us the gov- 
erning principle of metaphysics, that good in its battle 
with evil must always come off victorious, that the 
higher principle must inevitably finally conquer the 
lower. We can read this lesson at midwinter, when 
the sun, almost swallowed up in darkness, finally 
emerges into stronger and longer light. We can read 
it every morning, when night is vanquished, by the 
glorious light of day. To employ one of W. J. Col- 
ville's striking illustrations: The ancient Egyptians, 
thousands of years ago — as heathen as we consider 
them to have been — displayed a knowledge of this 
principle in their religious celebrations in which Osiris, 
their sun-god, in his battle with the dragon, always 
came off victorious. It was not sometimes Osiris and 
sometimes the dragon, sometimes good and sometimes 
evil, — sometimes God and sometimes the devil, as with 
our modern theologians, — but always good, always the 
Infinite, the Eternal, that conquered. 

If modern theology would endeavor to stand on this 
high ground, its vision would become so broadened that 
the temporary reign of evil would never appear inevita- 
ble and final. There might, and undoubtedly would, be 



THE TKUE METHOD OF HEALING. 27 

amicable differences between differently unfolded minds, 
but there could be no " Andover Controversy." 

It has been proved thousands of times by demonstra- 
tion, that faith in God, in good, reposeful trust in the 
supremacy of the Eternal over every opposing force, 
induces an approximation to that perfect happiness and 
health which we conceive to be inherent conditions of 
our Creator. But is this faith a matter of will ? 

It is a matter of will, of desire, to assume a passive 
attitude towards truth, to hold yourself in that recep- 
tive condition in the midst of your good works, which, 
when the truth comes, permits its knock to be heard. 
If you believed that a friend was coming to see you, 
you would not bar the door. You would wait, and 
watch, and listen, and meet that friend upon the thresh- 
old. We ask you to regard all possible truth as a 
friend, and not as an enemy. 

You say that reason tells you there is a divine, uni- 
versal, saving principle, which if you could apply to 
yourself would make you whole, but somehow you can- 
not apply it. You believe intellectually in this great 
truth, but you do not realize it, you do not feel it as a 
part of your inner self. 

You have heard that your friend lives and can come 
to you ; then expect him at any moment. You know 
that a vital truth exists ; then expect it to visit you. 
Make ready to welccftne it and conduct it to the inner 
chamber of your soul. 



28 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OR, 

A tree is only passive, — presenting no obstacles of 
prejudice, or error, or sin, — yet it appropriates the uni- 
versal life-giving atmosphere, and grows, and blooms, 
and bears fruit. How much more, then, should a con- 
scious soul appropriate the divine ether, the native 
atmosphere of spirit, to the health of mind and body ! 

W. F. Evans, in that beautiful chapter on trust, in 
his " Esoteric Christianity," says that this healing energy, 
this life of angels and men, stands forever inclined to 
save, and the best thing we can possibly do is to let it 
save us. 

First desire to be saved, then hold yourself open to 
the one and only power that can save. As soon as this 
power is felt by you, it will generate faith, and your 
faith in turn w.^ 1 increase the power to the begetting of 
still greater faith. Whe^ your whole soul is opened to 
the divine atmosphere, your faith will then be perfect. 

Before, however, you can arrive at this sublime, this 
passive, this perfect trust, you may have work to do. 
Your salvation must be worked out, and you alone can 
do it. If you are a victim of disease and are working 
out your salvation in suffering, it is because you 
are still in ignorance and error. It is because you have 
not yet opened your mind to truth. However rich you 
may think yourself, you are poor in soul, for you lack 
the gold of truth. You are crossing the ocean as a 
steerage passenger because you have not money enough 
for the cabin. Your poverty at this moment may not 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 29 

be guilt, but it becomes guilt when a dear friend offers 
you the price of comfort and happiness and you refuse 
it. God is our friend, and he never prefers to have us 
suffer. You have brought the condition of suffering 
upon yourself, knowingly or unknowingly, actively or 
passively. 

You believe that this truth, this faith, might cure a 
slight ailment, but you are beyond the reach of this sav- 
ing power, for you have an incurable disease. 

We reply that there is no such thing as an incurable 
disease. Jesus taught and demonstrated this great 
truth. He did not tell his disciples to cure slight ail- 
ments, but he told them to heal all manner of diseases. 

There are no incurable diseases, but there are certain 
conditions in the minds of certain individuals, or in the 
minds dominating theirs, which render it impossible to 
cure them of whatever disease they may have, while 
remaining in that condition of mind. The important 
question with a metaphysician is, not what is your dis- 
ease, but what is your condition of mind. Are you 
hostile or friendly to the truth ? Will you remain in a 
hostile condition, or will the influence of truth be able 
to enter into your mind and change that condition ? 

You urge that you have a cancer, and that it is really 
there, whatever any one may think about it. The 
doctors all say that it is settled ; that the tissues are 
broken down ; that the system is already poisoned. 

We reply, then, that the power of spirit can un- 



30 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OR, 

settle the disease ; that it can build up the broken-down 
tissues, and eject the poison from your system. Why 
not ? Spiritual power by the action of your mind stead- 
fastly fixed upon truth can so rouse up into action 
every function of your body, that recuperation will 
supersede waste ; that sound tissues will replace un- 
sound ones ; that pure blood will drive out the impure. 
But turn your mind away from the changes that may 
be working in your body. Lose sight of your body, 
except so far as to see it already healed. 

Have you never seen a change in the mind produce a 
change in the body? Does not fright suspend the 
natural action of the heart, impede the flow of blood in 
the arteries, cause one to shiver with cold, turn pale, 
and faint ? Does not sudden joy hasten the action of 
the heart, send the blood rushing through the sj^stem, 
flush the cheeks and brighten the eyes ? Are not fear 
and joy states of mind? If such changes can be 
wrought by momentary and so-called accidental condi- 
tions of mind, what may not be accomplished by per- 
sistent effort in an intelligent leading of the thoughts 
into truth ? 

A physician will tell a person in grief, that his mind 
has dwelt upon his bereavement until the tone of his 
system is so lowered that he is open to the attack of dis- 
ease. Then why may not one dwell upon an encourag- 
ing, a joyful truth, until the tone of his system is so raised 
that he is protected against disease. It is known even 



THE TKUE METHOD OF HEALING. 31 

to medical science that one can do so, but material 
science limits this power of mind. Spiritual science 
affirms that there is no limit to the power of spirit. 
All limitations that exist regarding it are in ourselves. 
It is for us to break away the limits and let spirit 
perform its perfect work. 

The so-called power of matter is the only power that 
is limited. Spirit working through matter does some 
good, and sometimes does great good. Material reme- 
dies do good with the mind that is in them, but mind 
unencumbered with matter can do all good. 

Electricity can abort a boil. The inflammation is 
really there, the swelling is really there, but, neverthe- 
less, they disappear, and the boil is gone. What be- 
comes of it? The functions of the body are roused up 
into action, the undue quantity of blood is withdrawn 
from the inflamed spot and turned into its natural 
channel again. This process is no marvel. It is the 
natural one. The forming of the boil is the unnatural 
one. Health is natural. Disease is unnatural. The 
body stands ready to be helped the instant spirit will 
lend its aid. 

The power of mind in electricity can abort a boil, 
but it cannot abort an advanced cancer. Why? 
When the cause of an ailment is more external, exter- 
nal means may cure. When spirit has serious work to 
do, it must throw off the incumbrance of matter. It 
would do the lesser work without matter, but it cannot 



32 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OR, 

do the greater work with matter. When Jesus em- 
ployed clay and the saliva from his mouth in opening 
the eyes of the blind, his teaching was to destroy 
rather than build up faith in material remedies. He 
seemed to make a concession to the material condition 
of the minds present. He taught that spirit could 
work through matter (or in spite of it), and one 
form of matter as well as another — not necessarily 
expensive and rare drugs, but matter that was always 
accessible, and was without price. It was the first 
crude lesson to those who, perhaps, could have received 
nothing higher in the great truth, that our remedies are 
always with us, that they are free to all. But when his 
greatest work was to be done, when one considered 
dead was to be raised again to life, he stood upon the 
high ground of pure spirit. He commanded the soul 
to come forth and manifest itself. Matter may seem to 
do the little work, but spirit alone must do the great 
work. 

You say that although the doctors can cure your 
cold, they cannot cure your cancer. Then set about 
the work yourself. You are through with material 
remedies; they have told you that they can do nothing 
more for you. The surgeon's knife has promised to rid 
you of your cancer if it has not advanced too far. 
This cancer may disappear, but the great workshop of 
disease — the mind in error — is still in operation, and 
your ideas can take form in other cancers indefinitely. 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 33 

Remove your faith from that which, at best, is only a 
postponement of evil, and put a stop to the evil that 
is working in your own mind. 

You ask if a diseased person can heal himself. 

We reply that one who is in a condition of mind 
to have disease is not in a condition of mind to cure 
disease. But that condition can and may change at 
any moment ; work to change that condition. Never 
settle down under the conviction that your ailments 
must be cured by another. The fountain of living 
water is as free to you as to any other created being. 
But if you do not feel that your condition of mind has 
changed, if your discord has such hold upon you that 
you cannot yet master it unaided, then ask assistance of 
one more firmly grounded in truth than yourself. Go 
to some healer in whom you have confidence, and who 
is adapted to you, and ask co-operation in the good 
work. Go to one who has conquered his own ills, who 
has, perhaps, — which is still better, — conquered an ill 
similar to your own. But however much a healer may 
aid you in opening your soul to truth, remember it is 
you who must do the work. One person can no more 
heal another than one person can breathe for another. 
Fresh air may be supplied you, and your lungs may be 
strengthened for their office, but it is your lungs that 
must breathe for you. 

Continuing further, you say — still holding on to 
your disease as if it were a friend instead of an enemy 



34 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OR, 

— that all the faith and all the work in the world 
could not cure you, because there is nothing wrong in 
you. The discord or the error is not yours; it was 
handed down to you by your mother. Your disease is 
an inheritance, and cannot be removed. 

We, as metaphysicians, do not like to talk about 
disease. We do not like to hear about disease. But 
if disease is in your mind, we must bring it forward, in 
order to rid you of it altogether. In sweeping a room 
we must create a dust. We do not like the dust, but 
we must have the room clean even at the risk of raising 
a dust. We say to you that it is no matter where 
your disease comes from; if you have it, it is yours, 
and yours to conquer. We cannot reply better than in 
the words of that most illuminated spiritual teacher, 
W. J. Colville : — 

" If you have inherited evil, you have also inherited 
the power to overcome evil. If you have inherited sin, 
you have also inherited the power to overcome sin. 
Back of Adam there is always God." 



THE TETTE METHOD OF HEALING. 35 



CHAPTER V. 



HEEEDITY. 



" Fear not, little flock, for it is your father's good pleasure to 
give you the kingdom." — Luke 12 : 32. 

The Lord's kingdom is our inalienable inheritance, 
but we can no more reap the fruits of that inheritance 
than of any other, until we enter into possession of it. 
If we only hear that a certain land is ours, but do not 
know how to gain possession of it, it will do us no 
good. 

There is bat one inheritance that is so fixed upon us 
that we cannot possibly alienate it, and that is the in- 
heritance of eternal life. 

In metaphysics we are not dealing with a question of 
eternal life or of final happiness, for we believe that 
each individual, divine soul of man will reach its des- 
tined end in supreme happiness, and continue to live 
throughout eternity. The question is, whether we are 
to arrive at inevitable final good through error and 
suffering, and be a curse to our fellow-beings, or 
through noble effort and happiness, and be a blessing 
to them. 

What kind of an idea of supreme goodness has one 
who supposes that God intended us to bear the evil 



36 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OR, 

results of another's sin, to our own detriment? If 
evil has come into our life seemingly through the 
agency of another, it is here for us to overcome, to get 
rid of, not to guard, sustain, and perpetuate. 

There certainly are some human beings born into 
this life under a load of moral, mental, and physical 
corruption, while others begin this present existence 
with an inheritance of moral, mental, and physical 
soundness. Why the former class should come into a 
condition of things that necessitates hard combat with 
evil, and why the latter class should come into a condi- 
tion which, at the very outset, promises an immunity 
from every kind of warfare, are questions that have 
been variously answered, in various ages, and by vari- 
ous philosophies of the world. 

It is difficult for some minds to reconcile this work- 
ing of heredity with that perfect justice which they 
wish to ascribe to Deity. 

To one who is so unfolded as to accept the teaching, 
there is perhaps no elucidation of this point that so har- 
monizes with an idea of perfect justice as that expressed 
in the law of karma as set forth in Oriental Theosophy, 
under which law each individual has earned his own 
heredity as the fruit of his unfoldment in former incar- 
nations. There is in fact no system that does permit 
an enlightened mind to see the justice of God in hered- 
ity, except this encouraging, this hopeful one, which 
tells us so emphatically that we suffer nothing we have not 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 37 

earned; that we reap nothing we have not sown. We 
may feel ourselves bound to accept as a dogma, upon 
some religious authority, the truth that God is just even 
in heredity, because being justice itself, he could be 
only just ; but we do not in that way see it for ourselves. 

In what way the law of karma, or sequence, works to 
attract us before birth to those spiritual, moral, mental, 
and physical conditions in harmony with our own 
spiritual, moral, and mental condition, is more a ques- 
tion of spiritual evolution than of metaphysics. To 
those of you who can accept only a little of Oriental 
Theosophy, we say that metaphysics, although included 
in pure wisdom-religion, does not require you to go 
further or faster out of the beaten track than you are 
able to go. 

The all-important question is, not how did we come 
by our inheritance, but what shall we do with it now 
that we have it. We may call it Platonic heredity, and 
think that we have earned it ourselves, or we may con- 
sider ourselves a victim of ancestors clear back to Adam ; 
but of one thing we are sure — the heredity is ours. 
Now, what shall we do with it ? Shall we destroy that 
which is evil and hold fast to that which is good ? Or 
shall we, through ignorance or perversity, hold fast to 
the evil until the good becomes buried out of sight ? It 
is for us to replace evil with good. As all sin originates 
in thought ; it is for us to substitute right thinking for 
wrong thinking. 



38 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OR, 

Thought shapes the mind in symmetry or deformity, 
as it is true thought or false thought, and the mind 
shapes the body to its own image or likeness. 

Suppose you have a disease that doctors have taught 
the world to call consumption. Suppose your mother 
had this disease and transferred to you the thought that 
consumption was your inheritance and therefore inevi- 
table. Suppose you already have one diminished lung. 
There is no reason why you should continue in the 
thought that has been put upon you. There is every 
reason why you should not add another link to your 
chain of error. If your lung is diminished, it may be 
made to increase again and attain its rightful size and 
rightful function, or you can get along perfectly well with 
it as it is. Turn your mind away from your lungs. 
They can never become whole under the action of your 
mind in error. By fixing your anxious mind upon any 
organ, you can produce inflammation, but you cannot 
allay it. Your body does not require from your mind any 
more attention than you give to your clothing. A healthy 
animal relies wholly upon spiritual power to build up 
his organism; cannot you do as much? Regard your- 
self as only a spiritual being, therefore whole and sound. 
Become indifferent to any pain you may feel. Know 
that in spite of whatever pain you may feel in your 
body, you are in your real, immortal self, perfectly well. 

We know a lady who is now in the condition just 
referred to. She is pronounced to have hereditary con- 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 39 

sumption and already one diminished lung. She 
received the truth of metaphysics as a new and startling 
revelation less than two months ago, and she has 
already so made it her own that she is far on the road 
to recovery. Her first battle was with fear — that 
powerful ally of disease. She has conquered a fear of 
bad weather, a fear of excitement, a fear of fatigue and 
numberless other fears that attend error and fill one's 
life with torment. She has displaced her belief in the 
fatal issue of her ailment, by a firm belief in her speedy 
recovery. She has become assured and happy and 
strong. For the first winter in years, she braves the 
New England climate, and finds the obstacle of climate 
a mole-hill instead of a mountain. She pays no atten- 
tion to weather, except so far as to dress comfortably. 
She says that when she feels a pain in her lungs or 
when she coughs, she literally cares nothing about it. 
As she is a pure, conscientious woman, with no positive 
vices to combat, we feel just as sure of her ultimate 
recovery as though it were already accomplished. Of 
course we could cite numberless cases o± recovery ac- 
complished, but there are enough such already on 
record. A mention of the different steps of progress 
towards recovery is sometimes more useful. 

It is generally supposed that an inherited disease is 
the one most difficult of cure, while the reverse is fre- 
quently the case. The difficulty lies mostly in the long 
hold the error has had upon your mind and in the be- 
lief that the disease is difficult of cure. 



40 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OR, 

If you have inherited not only your belief in the 
reality of the disease, — the so-called physical ailment, — 
but have also inherited the tendency to error that orig- 
inally induced the disease, you have two enemies in- 
stead of one to conquer. But if, on the other hand, 
you have only a belief in the reality of your disease, 
you have but one enemy, and a comparatively easy one, 
to vanquish. 

Suppose, for example, that your father had been dis- 
solute, and had died of what is termed Bright's disease 
of the kidneys, induced by his excesses, which, of 
course, originated in his immoral condition of mind. 
Now, the belief in weak kidneys was transferred to 
your mind even before birth, and imprinted upon it 
again and again after birth, by your father, by your 
mother, and doubtless by any number of relatives and 
friends. But in some way you were protected against 
that vicious tendency of mind which was the cause of 
the disease in your father. You then have only a mis- 
take, a weakness, to overcome, and not a vice. It is 
not a love of evil that must be rooted out of your 
heart, but only a negative condition of mind that you 
must change to a positive one. You are suffering from 
a false belief and a passivity to the influence of other 
minds. As soon as you come into a knowledge of 
truth, you willingly correct your belief, and conquer your 
weakness. Your friends — those worst of enemies — 
will say of you, " Poor fellow ! he is very good, not at 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 41 

all like bis father morally ; but then he has his father's 
disease, and, of course, will die of it." 

Now, even if you had inherited your father's im- 
moral tendency of mind as well as the so-called physi- 
cal disease, there would be no reason why you should 
not conquer both; and it would not be a matter of 
time, but a matter of spiritual power, of how much 
spiritual power you could open yourself to receive. 
Never, for an instant, feel that you cannot, with God 
and all the angels on your side, completely vanquish 
every evil to which you may be subject. But if with 
your inheritance, you have only a mistake to drive out 
of your mind instead of an evil to drive out of your 
heart, you will frequently find the conquest so prompt 
and easy that you will be amazed. 

We have known cases in which a long list of heredi- 
tary errors, with distressing physical results, have, one 
after another, disappeared, before a certain slight ail- 
ment, whose cause still lived among one's own passions 
or desires, evinced the least sign of retiring. When 
there is not only error in the mind but an affinity with 
evil in the affections, stronger weapons are needed in 
the contest. Never consider an hereditary ailment 
hopeless, for it may give you the easiest work you will 
have to do. 

God has told us through Moses that He visits the 
iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the 
third and fourth generation of them that hate Him, 



42 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OR, 

and shows mercy unto thousands of them that love 
Him and keep His commandments. 

Now, shall we rank ourselves with those, who, in the 
figurative language of the Orient, hate God, that is, do 
not live in accordance with his law, or shall we be with 
those who love him and keep his commandments, who 
live in harmony with his law ? If your fathers have 
lived a sinful life, their iniquities will be handed down 
to you ; and if you do not live in harmony with divine 
law, and cast off your iniquities, they will in turn be 
visited upon your posterity. 

Whether your posterity are, according to Oriental 
Theosophy, attracted to your sphere through their own 
harmic conditions, or whether, according to Western 
Orthodoxy, you are making new impressions upon 
newly created souls, your evil conditions of mind will 
certainly reappear in them until such conditions are 
overcome and put out of existence altogether. If, on 
the other hand, you live in accordance with God's 
fixed laws, you will enjoy his promised mercy. If you 
open your soul to divine life, if you conquer the evil 
that is now yours, you will hand down to future gener- 
ations your own soundness of mind and body. 

Never dwell upon the difficulties of your case. 
Difficulties exist only relatively to yourself or to the 
healer who brings you the light. Jesus was so ad- 
vanced in his spiritual unfoldment, that difficulty did 
not exist for him. His work of healing was mostly 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 43 

performed in an instant with no recognition of hin- 
drance. 

We have only to hold him in mind as our ideal. We 
have only to endeavor to be perfect even as he was per- 
fect. We have only to press forward continually 
towards his standard ; then error will flee before us like 
chaff before the whirlwind. Let us each day overcome 
the evil that is within us with the good that is still 
more surely within us. 



44 PKACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OE, 



CHAPTER VI. 

OVERCOMING EVIL WITH GOOD. 

" To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life." 
Rev. 2 : 7. 

To insure having good fruit, we not only water the 
vine, but we tear up the weeds in the vineyard. 

We must be contented if we can pull up the weeds 
only one by one. We must not be impatient for great 
works and great results. 

Do what comes to your hand to do to-day ; do not be 
looking out for the work of to-morrow. You must be- 
come day laborers in the vineyard of the Lord. The 
Master will apportion to you each your work for to- 
day, and it is for him, and not you, to plan for to- 
morrow. Carrying the mind anxiously over into the 
future cripples the energies for the work of the present. 

You may have no conspicuous vices to battle, but you 
have only to search in order to find within yourself 
some one error, and in all probability a host of them. 
Each day endeavor to bring some good work face to 
face with an evil, and that evil will turn and flee before 
it as Satan is said to flee from holy water. Conquer 
a wrong condition of mind by introducing a right con- 
dition. 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 45 

If you have an envious feeling towards your neighbor, 
correct it by ringing loudly his praises, praises which 
you know to be just, and can utter in all sincerity. 
There is no one so devoid of good that he cannot be 
justly praised. If you feel angry with a friend, give him 
the kindest word at your command, and the word, if 
uttered with a struggle for the corresponding feeling, 
will help you to the feeling, without which the word 
would be mere hypocrisy. If your thoughts are dark 
and gloomy, engage in a lively conversation on some 
bright topic. If alone, converse with yourself, and let 
the voice of truth ring out above the voice of error and 
have the last word in every discussion. Truth is always 
true, whether you feel it to be so or not ; and if you do 
not feel its force with the first utterance, you may do so 
with the second. This is overcoming evil with good. 

By overcoming one evil we unite ourselves with that 
realm of thought which helps us to overcome a thou- 
sand more. An earnest desire for truth sent out into 
the unseen universe is a cry for allies that brings 
mighty armies into our camp. Conquest in one direc- 
tion strengthens us not only in that, but in every other 
direction. 

To make this practical by illustration. We know a 
lady who began the day feeling that she had a severe 
cold and a violent headache. Now, one of this lady's 
most striking inharmonies resulted in an aversion to 
music in the early part of the day. Although she was 



46 PEACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OR, 

fond of music and a musician herself, she could not 
listen to any sort of music early in the morning without 
a feeling of impatience and even ill-temper. Her friend 
and healer, who knew of this peculiar inversion of her 
mind, and who was with her on this particular morning, 
proposed her singing a certain little song as a remedy 
for her cold. The proposal at first excited a feeling of 
disgust. It seemed impossible for her to comply 
with it. At length, however, she overcame her morbid 
condition sufficiently to hum the song in a faint voice. 
The healer requested her to try again, and sing it better 
and louder. She then made an earnest effort and 
repeated the melody in clear, loud, sustained tones. 
When she had finished, she cried out suddenly that her 
headache was gone, that her cold had all disappeared. 

She was, from that moment, entirely well, and wholly 
by means of the effort she had made to overcome a 
morbid condition of mind. 

There may be no logical connection between music 
and a cold, but there is a very logical connection be- 
tween harmony of mind and harmony of body, — a con- 
nection that is positive, reliable, and inevitable. 

We say not only that you will become sound in body 
in proportion as you drive out such inclinations as 
come forward into your consciousness; but we assert 
that you will never be perfectly well until you have 
brought forward to the light and conquered such evil 
dispositions as lie quiescent in the past and even 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 47 

buried. in oblivion. You will never have sound health 
so long as there lurks anywhere in your soul hatred for 
any human being, even though that being may have 
long since passed out of this life. You may not have 
seen the object of your aversion for years ; you may 
think that, as you have forgotten all about it, your 
hatred no longer lives ; but it does live until you have 
killed it, and you are the only one who can kill it. So 
long as the image of the hated person can arouse in 
you the slightest feeling of aversion towards him, you 
have not conquered the evil, and it may be the root 
of a certain otherwise unaccountable malady from 
which you are, at this very moment, suffering. 

If you would have sound health, bring forward all 
your hatreds of persons, and kill them at once. Nour- 
ish only hatreds of wrong principle. 

In order to arrive at a certain serene condition of 
mind, which results in a proper discharge of every 
function of the body, we have to overcome not only 
our positive inclinations to evil, but also those thou- 
sand and one negative conditions, which, though with- 
out guilt, hold us in ignorance and error, and render 
us a prey to other minds, which may be in guilt as 
well as error. We feel that we are pure, and yet we 
suffer. We feel that we are innocent, and yet there 
is no health in us. We are full of weaknesses. We 
are negative to error and positive to good, when the 
reverse should be the case. We cannot see truth. 



48 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OR, 

because our faces are turned towards error. We do 
not know which way to turn for truth. We allow 
ourselves to be guided, but guided wrongly. 

We are, perhaps, a prey to sorrow, grief, anxiety, 
fear, or some other one of that long list of negative 
errors which can always offer an excuse for their exis- 
tence in so plausible a sophistry. 

Have we not a right to mourn for our friends who 
have left the material body? 

Most certainly we have not. If we had a just con- 
ception of truth, we should find nothing to mourn 
about. Why should we mourn? are our friends in 
misfortune ? If their work is finished here, and they 
have a superior attraction elese where, why should we 
not be glad to have them go? If, on the other hand, 
they have destroyed their bodies through ignorance 
or sin, before their work in this existence was fin- 
ished, you may regret that they did not live rightly 
and wait the Lord's time to go hence, instead of tak- 
ing the matter into their own hands. But even this 
regret should not be encouraged, for going as they 
went was the only thing they could have done in 
their condition, and all for the best. If you are 
mourning for yourself, because you fail to realize your 
friend's presence in spirit, and can no longer see him 
with your material eyes, then surely your selfishness 
is wrong. The indulgence of grief injures those 
around you, and weakens your own power of doing 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 49 

good. Regard your grief as a weakness to be overcome. 
Do not sentimentally misname it a virtue, and nourish 
it and perpetuate it with tears, and proclaim it by 
robing yourself and your surroundings in black, which 
corresponds with the darkness of a benighted mind. 

You are, perhaps, full of fears and anxieties for 
yourself and for others. All such states of mind are 
errors, and have no foundation in truth. Anxiety only 
works an injury to the one on whom it is bestowed, 
as well as to yourself, and fears are the most fruitful 
sources of unhappiness and disease. Fears are death 
to spirituality. Are you not in the Lord's hands ? 
can he not provide for you and for all whom you 
love ? " Consider the lilies. " Is he not always doing 
the utmost that can be done for us all? is he not 
unceasingly doing all we will permit him to do? He 
allows no person or thing to harm us, except so far 
as is for our ultimate good. We have only to do 
our best in everything. We are not responsible for 
results. We have nothing to be anxious about. 

These negative errors, so often nourished by false 
sentiment, are as prolific sources of ill health as more 
positive vices. Let this be our test: the indulgence 
of any feeling that causes unhappiness to ourselves 
or others is always wrong. A tree is known by its 
fruit. Evil cannot result from good. If we see cor- 
rupt fruit, we may be sure that the tree which pro- 
duced it is corrupt. 



50 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OE, 

If you have hitherto taken a mistaken view of these 
things, then turn your face about, and change your 
point of view. Look towards truth, and truth only. 

Seek light, and you will surely find it. Seek knowl- 
edge, seek true wisdom, and you will surely find them. 






THE TKUE METHOD OF HEALING. 51 



CHAPTER VII. 

KNOWLEDGE A NECESSITY. 

" And there appeared a great wonder in heaven : a woman 
clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her 
head a crown of twelve stars." — Rev. 12 : 1. 

Ignorance is no protection against evil. It is not 
enough to be guiltless of any intentional wrong, but a 
knowledge of right is necessary, to guard us against 
evil. An infant, however innocent he may be, cannot 
be left in situations of danger to follow the bent of his 
own inclinations. Some one in more knowledge than 
he must guide him. Knowledge is necessary in all 
situations of life. We must have light on our path if 
we would not go astray. The intellectual as well as 
the moral part of our nature must be unfolded, or we 
mistake wrong for right, falsity for truth. 

If a godly man should walk off the edge of a precipice 
because he could not see it, he would no more be pro- 
tected from the fall and the destruction it would entail, 
than the deliberate suicide in a similar act, when carry- 
ing out his intention of crime. 

It is not enough to follow what we have been taught 
to consider truth, but we must learn what truth really 



52 PEACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OR, 

is, in order to lay hold upon it and govern our lives in 
accordance with it. 

Material science to-day is full of devotees, who, for 
the most part, are conscientious workers in their 
respective branches of learning, but they are blind to 
the higher truths. They live in the realm of effect, 
and mistake it for that of cause. They have looked 
so long and so exclusively upon matter, that they have 
lost their discernment of spirit. Their learning is a 
massive structure of ignorance on a foundation of 
error. 

The only way to dispel darkness is to introduce light. 
Gain knowledge, and ignorance will disappear. Igno- 
rance is no more real than darkness. Waste no time 
in lamenting ignorance, but turn your energies towards 
gaining a knowledge of the truth of being. Turn your 
gaze away from matter to spirit. 

The geologist, with his eyes turned earthward, learns 
nothing of the stars; yet the stars are more real and 
more lasting than the rocks. Spirit is more real and 
more lasting than matter. It is, in fact, the only real, 
the only everlasting substance. 

We are not created into full knowledge. We must 
work for it. We must first desire knowledge, then put 
forth our energies to gain it. If one sincerely desires 
knowledge, he will naturally seek it, and he will surely 
find it. 

The only serious obstacles in the way of gaining 



THE TiiUE METHOD OF HEALING. 53 

knowledge are prejudice and antagonism. If one 
feels that nothing exists which is beyond his grasp at 
this moment, or if he antagonizes a truth because he 
has not yet discovered it for himself, he builds up a 
high, wall in his path, that will inevitably put a stop to 
his onward march. 

Those of you who have already reared such walls of 
ignorance or conceit, demolish them at once ! Leave 
not one stone upon another. 

It is said that Narada, the Hindoo philosopher, gave 
utterance to the following wise sentiments : " Never 
utter these words 'I do not know this; therefore it 
is false.' One must study to know, know to under- 
stand, understand to judge." 

Now, whether it really was Narada who said this, or 
whether there ever really existed such a person as 
Narada, does not matter. Such a truth has been put 
forth, and has been preserved in Sanskrit literature for 
thousands of years. It was valuable when it was 
uttered, and it is just as valuable to-day, not because 
it is old, but because it is tutje. We should care less 
for the source of truth, and more for the truth itself. 
Material research spends its energy in discovering the 
correct origin of a certain old apothegm, but spiritual 
research only endeavors to absorb the truth there is 
in it. 

When we find truth, let us help ourselves to it. Truth 
is common property. It is ours whenever and wherever 



54 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OR, 

we are able to lay hold upon it. There can be no such 
thing as a monopoly of truth. No one has all truth, but 
there are always some who have more truth than we 
have just now. What we have not to-day, however, 
we may have to-morrow. 

Do not be like a blind man who refuses to be led 
because he thinks he can see as well as any one else, 
because he feels sure that the sense of sight is an illu- 
sion, and that no one knows any more about it than he 
does ; or that, if there is such a thing, it is purposely 
concealed from all of us, and we have no right to be 
prying into God's mysteries. 

God manifestly intended us to learn all that he has 
made us capable of learning. No faculty is given us 
for nothing. It is the little knowledge that is danger- 
ous, and not the great. 

It is one-sided knowledge that misleads. Jesus 
rounded out his whole nature until he became a per- 
fect man. He not only completely conquered his 
lower nature, and rose pure and unsullied in his broad 
philanthropy and his love of God, but his intellect also 
was wonderfully unfolded. When only twelve years 
old, he was so learned that he confounded the wise 
men of his age. 

Let us endeavor to develop our whole nature. Let 
us unfold our spirit and our intellect, our heart and 
our mind. Let us bring all our faculties into use. 
Let us be like the woman described by St. John. Let 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 55 

us be clothed with the sun — shielded with light and 
purity. Let us have the moon under our feet — the 
dependency of the earth, the lower nature, under our 
dominion. Let us have a crown of twelve stars upon 
our heads — a rounding out of the intellect complete in 
the cabalistic number twelve. Thus, and thus only, 
shall we be perfectly protected in truth. 



56 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OE, 



CHAPTER VIII. 

SPIRITUAL TELEGRAPHY. 

" For though I be absent in the flesh, yet am I with you in the 
spirit." — Col. 2 : 5. 

With what wonder and admiration we regard the 
science of material telegraphy ! It is with intense inter- 
est that we review the progress of this science of writ- 
ing afar, or, to speak more broadly, of projecting our 
thoughts to a distance by material means. We first see 
it in its alphabet, in the rude fire signals of the savage. 
Next, we find different thoughts expressing themselves 
in different colored lights, from signal poles or from fires 
on the ground. Then, passing through various grada- 
tions, we arrive at the semaphore, or signal boards of 
the French ; thence we go on up through intermediate 
steps until we reach the present stupendous achieve- 
ment in the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph. 

Matter, the most external expression of spirit, seems 
to have offered us its last resource in its most sublim- 
ated element, electricity. When material science cap- 
tured and pressed into service this high potency, it 
advanced to the borderland of spirit. If matter can go 
no further, if it can do no more for us, shall we not 



THE TKUE METHOD OF HEALING. 57 

now, in our onward march, turn perforce to spirit for 
aid? 

In these progressive days, in which even those who 
are still in a material stage of development find them- 
selves interested in the subject of mind-reading and 
thought-transferrence, now so prominently before the 
public, it would be strange indeed if those more 
advanced could not receive the great metaphysical 
truth which includes the higher phases of this wonder- 
working power, this silent telegraphy. Scientific ex- 
periment has its own legitimate work to do in the more 
external manifestations of this spiritual power, but 
would it not seem a poor spiritual economy to confine 
this power to the work of finding lost pins or discover- 
ing the numbers on a bank-note ? 

Thought is an energy, a substance, sent forth into the 
invisible atmosphere. It is visible to clairvoyant vision, 
and by that vision is seen to have form and color. 
u The color of a thought" is an expression more lite- 
rally correct than is generally believed. Thought can 
be directed to a given point like an arrow aimed at the 
heart of a bird, though, unlike the arrow, it is not limited 
by time or space. The character of thought determines 
the condition of the mind. Mind not only directs its 
thoughts to a given point, but it constantly throws 
them off by a natural but unconscious process like that 
of the emanations from the physical body, and these 
emanations, like those of the physical body, depend for 



58 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OR, 

their quality upon the condition of the source whence 
they proceed, which in the one case is a condition of 
mind and in the other a condition of body. 

We all feel, if we do not understand the fact, that 
every individual charges the invisible atmosphere with 
his mental emanations, just as surely as he charges the 
physical atmosphere with his material emanations. 
When we say that a person's atmosphere is very revolting 
to us, we do not necessarily mean that he is diseased or 
otherwise unclean, so that his physical emanations 
charge the air with impurities. But we feel — and just 
in proportion to our own sensitiveness — the impure 
quality of his soul emanations. We sense — that is, 
perceive by means of a spiritual sense — the impure 
quality of certain emanations from his mind in thoughts, 
or from his spirit in passions or desires. 

We are equally sensitive to good spiritual emana- 
tions. We have known those whose spiritual atmos- 
phere exerted so powerful an influence for good, that 
others have been benefited by entering — even in their 
absence — a room habitually occupied by them. We 
know a lady who said that however tired she might be, 
she had only to sit awhile in a certain friend's room — 
with that friend present or absent — to become 
thoroughly rested, and that a few moments' conversa- 
tion with that friend was all the tonic she ever needed. 

One may not be able to form a precise estimate of 
character by the nature of such an influence, but of this 



THE TfLUE METHOD OE HEALING. 59 

fact he may rest assured : if lie receive good from a per- 
son, good is in that person ; and if he receive evil from 
a person, evil is in that person. 

Many who by the use of reason have argued away the 
evidence of this spiritual perception, have, in the end, 
been forced to return to it as the only reliable witness. 
It is the only infallible witness, but must never be con- 
founded with that morbid distrust of others which 
results from our own inharmonious condition. The 
soul must be strong in truth and integrity before we 
can fully rely on its testimony. No court of justice 
accepts the testimony of a contradictory witness. While 
metaphysics may acknowledge the existence of an im- 
pure mental sphere, yet at the same time it protects 
you against its influence. It permits you to bask as 
much as you like in good spiritual magnetism, but for- 
bids you to be affected by bad spiritual, as well as by 
bad physical magnetism. 

If, then, we find ourselves so influenced by these un- 
directed spiritual and mental energies, how much more 
strongly shall we feel their power when they not only 
exist, but are directed to us ; when they are sent to 
us by will, or by intention, which is a more quiescent 
form of will. 

That both good and evil exist, now at this present 
stage of our unfold m en t, we will not deny ; but as evil 
is something we do not wish to perpetuate, we will not 
allow our minds to dwell upon it. It is not well to 



60 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OR, 

ponder the evil thoughts or bad emanations of others, 
either when directed against us or when existing pas- 
sively ; for if we are sufficiently in truth ourselves, we 
are always protected against them. One who cries out 
against the injury that is done him by another, only 
proclaims his own unsoundness. One may, and some- 
times should, know that the evil intention of another 
exists, but he should never be harmed by it. Truth 
renders us negative to good and positive against evil, 
passive to receive good and active to reject evil. 

Suppose a few benighted messengers are flashing 
their evil despatches along their telegraphic wires 
towards us? We are protected in truth ; consequently 
we know nothing about them. Our offices are not con- 
nected with their lines. We are in communication with 
only good. Our lines form a vast network in the in- 
visible ether, stretching north and south, and east and 
west, all controlled and guided by the Great Eternal, 
whose operators are willing co-workers in the service of 
only good. 

We need, then, to take into consideration only good 
thoughts. Could we once realize the immense power 
for good our good thoughts exert over others, as well 
as over ourselves, we should feel that nothing in our 
daily practical life was so important as to generate such 
thoughts, and we should set about the work at once. 

Are thoughts a matter of will ? 

Most certainly they are a matter of your will in 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 61 

conjunction with divine will. If you would have good 
thoughts in abundance, do not keep them for your own 
exclusive use. All the laws of self-healing equally 
apply to the healing of others. Constantly draw for 
others from the pure spring whence you draw good 
thoughts for yourself, and they will flow in to you more 
purely and more abundantly. 

Give not only in word and deed, but give in silent 
thought. Open dispensaries in your minds for the poor 
and needy. Give not only to those who ask, but to all 
who can receive. Set up your telegraphic wires, that 
you may at any moment flash forth a silent, unseen 
message that can never be refused. 

A thought given silently to another frequently 
infuses itself so subtly into that other's mind, so weaves 
itself in with the texture of his own thoughts, that, not 
perceiving the presence of a foreign element, he believes 
the thought to be his own, and has no wish to refuse it. 
However opposed one may be to the thought of an- 
other, he does not antagonize what he believes to be his 
own thought, that is, what he believes to originate in 
himself, for any thought is really his own as soon as he 
has accepted it. 

Although there are cases in which thought is best 
conveyed by speech, yet thought is as much more pow- 
erful than speech as steam is more powerful than the 
engine conducting it. Speech without thought, like the 
engine without steam, is without power. If we could 



62 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OK, 

employ steam without the engine, we should have 
steam in its highest potency. Were we in a condition 
always to employ thought without the limitation of 
speech, we should have thought in its highest potency. 

Any thought that comes from the realm of soul and 
appeals to the inmost soul presents truth in its highest 
potency. By speech and argument truth is presented 
to the intellect. Error is combated in that lower and 
mortal degree of the mind termed mortal mind. But 
however externally truth may be presented, it must pene- 
trate to the inmost being before it becomes available. 

If your intellect is more unfolded than your spirit, if 
your spiritual faculties are dormant, it may be well, in 
case you do not antagonize truth, to approach you in 
speech with argument. In your case the intellect may 
prove the most ready messenger to the inner nature, 
with the good tidings. But there are so many cases in 
which this method is rendered impossible by absence, 
and nothing but silent thought is left you, nothing but 
telegraphy will serve your purpose. 

Rest assured that no soul is so closed against good 
that persistent thoughts of truth cannot finally break 
down the barriers and enter within. We may say that 
so long as one is in the love of sin and hatred of truth, 
he cannot be reached; but it is not for us to say at 
what moment he may, by the power of truth, change 
that condition. When the truth is hateful to a person, 
we can approach him only with silent thought ; we can 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 63 

only flash the light along our telegraphic wires and 
upon his unconscious and therefore unresisting mind, 
with an assurance that it must finally penetrate to the 
darkness within. 

This universal, ever-present power of thought is 
without money and without price. We need no cum- 
brous machinery to set it in motion. We need no 
expensive tools to manipulate it. It is ours as freely as 
the sunlight and the air we breathe, and we have only 
to desire good in order to press it into our service and 
set it in motion. 

We do not need even to continue in active thought in 
order that a work which we have begun may continue. 
If we begin a good work, God will finish it for us. If 
we send forth a good thought to a friend, we start in 
his direction a current of divine life, which, even 
though our thoughts may be taken from him altogether, 
will continue to flow through us to him until he has 
taken in all he is in a condition to receive. There is 
no limitation in the life principle ; there is a limitation 
only in the patient. 

One does not need to be what is termed a profes- 
sional healer in order to be a constant healing power. 

Any occupation soever can be dedicated to the heal- 
ing of the nation. We know of those who, beginning 
the day with manual labor, or even literary work, pref- 
ace their occupation with a telegraphic message to 
some friend, thus freighting their day's work with an 



64 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OR, 

intention to heal, and in this way effecting marvellous 
cures. God only needs to know our good intention in 
order to use us as instruments for good, and while his 
living water is flowing through us, it is filling us also 
with life. We cannot carry good to others without 
receiving good ourselves. There is, perhaps, no better 
way to heal ourselves than by dedicating all our work 
to the uplifting and healing of some one else. 

A passive, receptive attitude towards good, with a 
calm, trustful intention in its direction to others, is more 
powerful than active mental energy, for this latter con- 
dition contains more of the element of personal will. 
But this trustful condition, which is the result of much 
conquest over self, must never be confounded with that 
dulness and indifference which simulate it. 

Let us send forth our telegrams in a quiet, full confi- 
dence that God surely will use us as an instrument for 
good in the special case we have on hand, and we shall 
be sure to hear that our patient is benefited. 

Put out of your mind all ideas of distance and time, 
in sending forth your thought. Thought can travel 
from Boston to China as easily and as quickly as it can 
travel from one room to another in the same house, or 
from one mind to another in the same room. Does it 
take you any longer to think of a friend in Pekin than 
it does to think of one in an adjoining room ? 

We know a healer in Boston who is treating a pa- 
tient in Africa, and she feels just as sure that the good 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 65 

messages she is flashing in that direction reach their 
destination, as you do that the telegraphic despatch you 
have just started off for New York will reach its desti- 
nation, and a thousand times more sure, for there are 
no broken wires along God's lines ; there are no strikes 
among His operators ; there is no boycotting to close 
His offices. 

We know of many remarkable cases of what is 
termed absent healing, or healing by telegraphy. We 
have in mind one in which a healer has effected a mar- 
vellous moral work in one whom she has never seen. 
Her thoughts are sent through a friend of the patient, 
with whom she is acquainted. With a thought of this 
friend in mind to guide her messages, she has roused 
up the divine nature within him, until he has undergone 
a reformation of character. Good traits have risen in 
ascendency over evil ones, and the improvement in his 
moral atmosphere is perceived nowhere so clearly as in 
his own home. The healer held him in her thoughts as 
already possessed of the virtues she desired him to 
have, thus infusing this ideal into his unconscious mind, 
until at length he desired to attain to it. 

We all know that if we associate closely with one 
whom we admire, we at length resemble that person. 
Now, a spiritual ideal which has found its way into our 
soul is much more powerful than any external influence 
which is not likely to penetrate so deeply into our 
nature. 



66 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OK, 

A silent message is the only one likely to be ac- 
cepted by an antagonistic mind. One who has not yet 
reached the stage of unfoldment at which he would be 
willing to acknowledge himself susceptible of outside 
influence, likes to feel that if he is doing better, it is 
because he chooses to do better ; for Satan has a grand 
opinion of his own personal will power, and prides him- 
self on being able to resist good. 

We constantly hear of healers who cure the most 
serious and so-considered incurable diseases, and their 
cures are loudly praised, as they deserve to be, for they 
are good works; but that higher work of moral and 
spiritual enlightenment which makes itself known only 
to those connected with the inner life of the patient, is 
a work which in days to come will so eclipse the heal- 
ing of mere bodily disease, as to make it seem only a 
smattering of the divine science of healing. 

The great work is always the silent work. The sun 
makes no noise however brightly it may shine, yet it 
gives light to a whole circle of worlds. 

The sun may seem far away, but its light is not lost 
in space or diminished by distance. It no sooner rises 
over the mountain top than it flashes to us its messages 
of light and heat to quicken us into new life. 

If we would work effectually with our highest po- 
tency, our spiritual power, we must erase from our 
mind all thought of time and space. If we would 
employ this power aright, we must work as a spiritual 



THE TKUE METHOD OF HEALING. 67 

being. In healing another we must proceed as one 
spiritual being with another spiritual being, who can at 
any instant be present to each other. 

You perhaps lament and bewail the fate of a dear 
friend who is addicted to intemperance. If you could 
only influence him for good ! But he is so far away. 
What can you do for him when he is on the Pacific 
Coast and you are on the Atlantic ? Then you know 
very little of his surroundings. His wife writes you 
that he keeps bad company, that he is always intoxi- 
cated, and that he and his family are in destitution. 
Sympathy would not eradicate the evil, and money 
would be only a temporary relief. What can you do ? 

You can do everything. Set yourself to work at 
once! Send the wife your first telegram this very 
moment. Then write to her and teach her how to co- 
operate with you. Do not fear opposition from her. 
She may have no conception of spiritual things, but 
she is in the condition of a drowning person who would 
grasp at a straw. In your telegrams to the husband, 
tell him what you really see in his higher nature, and 
what he in his best moments has himself given utter- 
ance to. Tell him that he does not wish to drink, that 
it is a vice which is hateful to him, that the taste, and 
even the smell of liquor is repugnant to him, that he 
positively cannot raise the glass to his lips. Tell him 
again and again that he does not drink, that he is a 
sober, a temperate man. See him as the youth you 



68 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OK, 

knew years ago, manly and upright. Tell him that he 
wishes to avoid all who would lead any one into vice. 
But, above all, see him with the tempter driven out of 
himself, and he will then find no tempter without. See 
him hastening from his work to enjoy his home. See 
his leisure hours filled with rational amusement in 
which his wife can bear him company. Every day re- 
peat your telegrams to him, and at such hours as he 
will be likely to be in a passive condition of mind — if 
asleep, so much the better, for you are not working 
upon his conscious mind. 

Your work with him is only a part of your work. 
Send to his wife all the hopeful, encouraging thoughts 
you can command, and, above all, treat yourself until 
you are able to erase from the canvas of your mind all 
those pictures of your patient in error, that have been 
presented to you by his wife. So hold him in your 
mind as a temperate, happy man, that, whenever your 
thoughts by chance revert to him, his image will be in 
harmony with this picture of him. 

Your friend does, as you say, live a long way off, and 
it is a month before you receive an answer to your first 
letter to his wife. 

She is a good woman, though quite unspiritual, as 
you imagined, yet she has eagerly carried out your 
suggestions. When your letter arrived, she had been 
thinking, for some time, that a peculiar influence was 
at work upon her husband. He had not been drinking 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 69 

so much. One night he actually came home sober. 
He said that somehow the whiskey he called for did 
not taste good, nor feel good either, and that he was 
sick of the saloon and the whole lot there. 

She had tried to treat him exactly as you told her ; 
but when he went out next day, she was so afraid he 
would come staggering home ; and she was not mis- 
taken : he did so. 

Poor little woman! of course he did. It seems 
almost cruel to tell her — as you must do — that it was 
her fear that brought him down again. She could not 
hold him in truth, and as yet he had no power to hold 
himself in it. 

Remember you have two patients on your hands. 
The wife needs more of your good thoughts than the 
husband, or, rather, it must be through her that you 
help the husband. Hers is the dominating mind, and 
she must be the chief instrument in his salvation. She 
has his material presence constantly before her to con- 
tradict her ideal in mind. Sustain her, strengthen her, 
let the divine life flow through you to her. 

Some weeks later you receive another letter. She 
did not dare to write too soon, but oh ! she has such 
joyful news to tell you ! Her husband does not drink 
any more. She feels sure he will never drink any more. 
He is so different in every way. He says he does not 
feel as he used to feel when he left off liquor for 
a while, always an intense craving for it ; but now he 



70 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OE, 

does not want it. The sight of it does not tempt him. 
He has lost all desire for it. They go out together in 
the evenings, and on Sundays, and they seem to be 
living over again the first happy year of married life. 
He is so kind to the children, and they are no longer 
afraid of him. She dares now to say that he is a 
reformed man. 

This case is in no way overdrawn. We know of 
many similar cases. 

We would never wish to imply that any certain 
length of time is requisite for a cure, even if some one 
cure did seem to require it. We would not say that a 
cure could not be accomplished in an instant, but do 
not be discouraged if an instant does not do the work. 

Continue without faltering to send your good mes- 
sages along God's lines, feeling sure that they accom- 
plish good, and He will take care of the result. 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 71 



CHAPTER IX. 

MATERIAL REMEDIES A FAILURE. 

" Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will 
he give him a stone ? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a ser- 
pent?"— Matt. 7: 9, 10. 

If one ask you for life, which is spirit, would you 
give him matter, in which there is no life ? 

Some of the wisest and most learned physicians, 
educated in the most advanced medical schools of their 
times, have, at the close of a long and so-called success- 
ful career, pronounced materia medica a failure. They 
have confessed their science to be one that worked in 
the dark, and was never certain of results. 

The doctor of medicine can do good in proportion to 
his sincere belief in his own methods, his conscientious- 
ness of purpose, his strength of mentality, but more 
than all, his spirituality. He himself acknowledges 
that he can go about so far with drugs, then a certain 
disease arrives at what he calls an incurable stage. He 
does not so much say that there are incurable disorders, 
as that there are incurable stages of certain disorders. 
Metaphysics acknowledges not only no incurable dis- 
ease, but no incurable stage of any disease. It does, 
however, acknowledge a certain condition of mind in 



72 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OR, 

the patient, or in the minds dominating his, which, 
while that condition remains, prevents a cure. 

A doctor of medicine recognizes this metaphysical 
law, when he asserts (as he frequently does) that if a 
hopeful person had a certain ailment, it could easily be 
cured, but with his patient, in his condition of mind, 
it cannot be cured. 

Material remedies do good, and sometimes do a 
great deal of good, by the mind that is in them. But 
spiritual power can do greater work when it is not 
hampered with matter. A man can swim a few rods 
in a great overcoat, but when he has to cross a broad 
stream he must rid himself of that burden. 

All remedies are universally effective in proportion 
as they are sublimated, or approach more nearly to 
spirit, and pure spirit is the most powerful substance 
in the universe. 

It is well known in mechanics that invisible steam is 
more powerful than more condensed visible vapor, and 
that visible vapor is more powerful that still more 
condensed water. 

Allopathy employs as a curative agency the grossest 
form of matter ; and while it can accomplish a tempo- 
rary good, it can also effect a great deal of harm. In 
its system of counter-irritants, while like metaphysics 
it turns the mind of the patient from his disease, yet 
unlike metaphysics, it turns his mind only from one 
disease to another, from one error to another, which 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 73 

may be better or may be worse. There is nothing to 
depend upon in a false system. You frequently hear 
that a certain drug serves one for a time, then suddenly 
fails him. The faith, the mind that was in it, seems to 
have departed, and it becomes worse than useless. The 
patient feels that it not only does not benefit him, but 
that its does him an injury. His belief verifies itself, 
and the drug becomes an injury to him. Then in case 
of a wrong diagnosis, the wrong drug is administered, 
and the result is perhaps fatal. 

Pure spirit can never, under any circumstances, 
injure any one. One may fail to receive it, but re- 
ceiving it must result in permanent benefit. 

Electricity, that link between spirit and matter, that 
most sublimated matter or that grossest spirit, would 
seem to approach more nearly to metaphysics than any 
other curative agency, and such might be the case 
could it be gathered from the atmosphere and admin- 
istered without mechanical aid. But as it is usually 
employed, with its chemicals and its cumbrous ma- 
chinery, it is further removed from pure spirit than 
either homoeopathy or animal magnetism. Indeed, with 
its accompaniment of matter in so gross and large a 
form, it approaches more nearly to allopathy. 

Homoeopathy is an immense spiritual advance on 
allopathy. The diminished quantities, and less gross 
forms of matter employed in homoeopathy, are more 
favorable to the working of mind through them. The 



74 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OR, 

advancing homoeopathist felt (if he did not fully under- 
stand) this law, when he asserted that the greatest 
effects were produced by those high attenuations in 
which there was no appreciable quantity of the drug 
left ; or, as some said (with more truth than they were 
aware), in which none of the drug remained, but only 
the dynamic power of the drug. 

Now as all dynamic power — all power of motion, of 
life — is spirit, they plainly acknowledged that when 
they refined away matter and left only spirit, their rem- 
edies were then the most powerful agents of healing. 

Hahnemann demonstrated to a large class of the 
public, first, that the curative power of a drug was not 
in proportion to its material quantity; second, that 
substances, which in a crude state exerted no medicinal 
power, came to possess that power after attenuation. 
In these two demonstrations he took the first two steps 
towards the dynamization theory. But many who 
could go thus far, were not willing to go a step further. 
Hearing of the " wonder cures " wrought by high 
potencies, they joined the ranks of the sceptic, Dr. 
Trinks, and said (with logic satisfying only to them- 
selves), that they did not believe a word of those cures, 
because they were impossible, A few doctors, more 
conscientious than the others, made a persistent trial 
of these high potencies in which they had no faith, and 
the result was (as metaphysics could have foretold), 
they found them as inefficacious as they expected them 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 75 

to be. If they had reversed their logic, and said that 
the cures by these high potencies were impossible to 
them because they did not believe in them, they would 
have hit upon the truth. The dynamic power was not 
in them. There was no faith to direct it. 

You ask how it is that these high potencies now 
affect cures, when the patient has no faith in them. 
We reply, that the patient's mind is only one mind, and 
an ill-conditioned mind at that, while the drug is 
freighted with faith from thousands of minds — those 
of druggists, of nurses, of doctors, both singly and in 
united medical faculties. You find high potencies 
most successfully administered by those physicians 
who have the strongest faith in their efficacy. 

If the homceopathist could only carry his truth a 
little further ; if he could only perceive that should he 
make use of this dynamic power, as he terms it, wholly 
detached from matter; should he draw his thoughts 
entirely away from their connection, with even water 
and a suggestion of the drug, he would find in pure 
spirit a remedy a thousand times more universal, more 
infallible, more marvellous, than any he had yet em- 
ployed. 

There is in fact no limitation in the power of God as 
a remedy for disease. All limitations are in the healer 
or in the patient. 

The homceopathist is far on his way to pure spirit as 
an agent of healing. If he has not arrived there to-day, 
he may do so to-morrow. 



76 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OK, 

Animal magnetism being more ethereal than any 
form of drugs is frequently a more effective agent of 
cure. Dealing, as it does, in occult forces, it seems 
more nearly allied to spiritual power. But, as there are 
good and bad drugs, so there are good and bad magnet- 
ism. Animal magnetism depends for its quality upon 
the physical condition of the healer. As no healer is 
in a perfect physical condition, no healer is able to give 
forth perfect emanations from his body. If you can 
receive good, you can also receive harm from a mag- 
netic healer. It is this eating of the tree of the knowl- 
edge of good and evil that is forbidden. When we dis- 
cover the most excellent curative agent, it is something 
in which the element of evil is not to be found. 

There are those who call themselves magnetic heal- 
ers who inconsistently tell you that their spirit-guides 
alone do the work. In such cases, so-called magnetic 
cures are the work of pure metaphysics. Their spirit- 
guides, having dropped the material body, have only 
spirit wherewith to perform the work. 

Mesmerism, though a power of mind, is, when em- 
ployed otherwise than for scientific experiment, a per- 
version of mental power. Like drugs and like magnet- 
ism, it may do either good or harm according to the 
condition of the one who employs it, but it is always 
slavery. Both the holding of slaves and the subjec- 
ting of one's self in slavery are founded on a wrong 
principle. Minds should be enlightened and liberated, 



THE TEUE METHOD OF HEALING. 77 

and not forced into truth blindly. If one is in truth 
through the personal will of another, his virtue is that 
of an automaton, and he will remain in truth only so 
long as the denominating will power lasts. 

We are always safe in the employment of pure 
spirit, as a remedy for every ill. We are always in the 
higher truth when we are in that attitude of mind 
which makes it possible for divine life to flow into us, 
or to flow through us to another. 

It seems to you marvellous that those whom you con- 
sider unprincipled can effect good as spiritual healers ; 
but it will not seem so if you reflect that a moment of 
pure benevolence, of desire and intention to benefit a 
fellow-creature, is as valuable in an habitually malevo- 
lent person as a similar moment in a righteous person. 

We feel positively certain that nothing like the same 
amount of good work is done by an unprincipled per- 
son as is accomplished by one who is pure and upright. 
But so far as any good is effected by an evil-minded 
person, just so far he must raise himself for the time 
being, upon a higher plane than the one on which he 
habitually lives. To work good with spiritual power, 
one must desire good, and open himself to good, if only 
for one solitary moment. 

We do not doubt that the sphere of many a healer's 
usefulness has been narrowed by his failure to demon- 
strate his teachings by the purity of his own life. But 
even in such a case metaphysics has still its rightful 



78 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OR, 

advantage ; it still proves all that it claims for itself ; 
for if one does not demonstrate truth by his purity, he 
is sure to do so by his impurity. A healer, like any 
one else, can never be healed in his sins. If a healer 
has not good health, it looks bad for him, but it does 
not harm metaphysics. 

Divine power is an agent that contains no element of 
evil ; therefore it cannot be abused. It may be refused, 
but it can never be abused. 

We have only to come more and more into a knowl- 
edge of truth, more and more into the reception of 
divine life, pressing on to the goal, in order to be sure 
of the crown that awaits the victor. 

The road of progress is not a blind alley. It lies 
open before us and always leads on to further truth. 
We are all upon that road, and must at length advance, 
however long we may loiter on the way. 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 79 



CHAPTER X. 

DISCORD AMONG SCHOOLS. 

"Then there arose a reasoning among them, which of them 
should be greatest." — Luke 9 : 46. 

A spirit of discord among adherents to any cause, 
for the most part results in a reasoning as to which 
shall be greatest. 

There are to-day many workers in the divine science 
of healing who, eclipsing truth with self, like John, 
forbid others to work in the cause because they do not 
proceed in just their way, and who need the reprimand 
given by Jesus to that disciple, when he told him to 
forbid them not, for those who were not against the 
cause were for it. 

There are some who, while they are modest enough 
to think they do not possess all truth themselves, yet 
go but one step further when they believe it is to be 
found only in some other one person or one school of 
thought. There is no one individual, there is no one 
class of individuals, that has arrived at the ultimate of 
knowledge. There are no narrow boundaries that can 
confine truth. It can be found everywhere. If differ- 
ent schools of thought upon the same truth are in 



80 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OK, 

existence, it is to meet the needs of different stages of 
unfoldment. Every supply is created by a demand. 

There may and must be different ways of accepting 
the science of healing, which necessitate different 
schools of metaphysics ; but there should be no discord 
among these schools. They all have truth. In their 
essential principle they are all right. The vital truth 
which governs them all is one and the same truth, how- 
ever they may differ in non-essentials, and under what- 
ever name they may be represented. Whatever divine 
power in them all is directed to the uplifting and heal- 
ing of the nation is one and the same divine power. 

If any one class of minds possesses more truth than 
another, why should this fact create a discord? Truths 
are never discordant. It is only errors that can clash 
and produce inharmony. There is no more discord in 
playing a melody with a hundred instruments than with 
only one, if they are all tuned to the same pitch. 
There is no more discord in truth presented by a hun- 
dred different minds than by only one. 

If your neighbor can accept more truth than you are 
now able to do, there is no reason why you should be 
intolerant towards him because he has gone beyond 
you, or why he should be intolerant of you because 
you have not yet arrived at his point. You are all on 
the road of truth, going each at your own pace, and 
there is no reason why you should be expected to go at 
another's pace. 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 81 

Naturally, you like your own school the best ; if you 
did not do so, it would not be your own school. It is 
adapted to your stage of unfoldment. You have every 
right to prefer it, but you have no right to feel that all 
the world ought to prefer it with you. 

Differences among schools of metaphysics, as among 
religious sects, are not only allowable but inevitable, 
while discords in either are both unnecessary and un- 
lawful. 

If light comes to you best through the medium of 
" Faith Cure," then " Faith Cure " is the handmaiden 
best suited to your service. In this branch of healing 
you are certainly resting upon the great fundamental 
truth, that by reliance on God all good is possible to 
you. There is no doubt that prayer places the soul in 
a receptive attitude towards the Eternal. But co-oper- 
ation is as necessary as prayer. We think that to have 
that perfect faith which is a realization of ever-present 
good, to know that, without supplication, you already 
possess all good, is to stand on higher ground than that 
on which the so-called " Faith Cure " is based. 

The vital force that sustains life is already ours. 
We have only to pull away the barriers and let it flow 
in upon us. What should you think of a man who 
shut himself up in a dark room with closed blinds, 
then fell on his knees and prayed for light? What 
should you think of a child who came hungry to his 
mother's well-laden table, and dropped on his knees, 



82 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OR, 

and begged and implored her for something to eat? 
Would not the mother tell him that he was blind if he 
could not see the abundance she had placed before 
him? Would she not say that he was wasting his en- 
ergy in fruitless supplication, that she knew his needs, 
and had already provided for them, and that he had 
only to receive? 

So God, who is our mother and father, has already 
provided spiritual food for us, which through the spirit 
can sustain and vivify even the physical frame. We 
have only to know it is here, and avail ourselves of it. 

There certainly are laws that govern this life force. 
Everything in the universe is governed by its own laws. 
In order that the child of whom we have spoken may 
sustain his body with the food placed before him, he 
must first be able to see the food that his mother in her 
love has given him ; then he must place himself in an 
attitude towards it that makes it possible for him to 
appropriate it. Precisely thus must we proceed with 
regard to our Heavenly Parent, and then our cure will 
be a cure by faith and by works. 

If you are limited by the narrow bounds of a cold 
philosophy that seems to be implied by the term " Mind 
Cure," you certainly have the truth that the material 
body should be under the perfect control of the mind, 
but it is a small truth to live by. It is the science of 
the Stoics, which seems to leave out God and the affec- 
tional nature. We do not think that all who rank under 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 83 

the standard of " Mind Cure " or " Mental Healing " are 
thus limited ; but if they are not, do not these terms fall 
short of expressing the science by which they work ? 

If truth under the name of " Christian Science " 
most fully meets your requirements, then " Christian 
Science " is your servant, and can best perform your 
work. The true science of healing most certainly was 
beautifully taught, practised, and lived by Jesus, the 
Christ of eighteen hundred years ago, as well as by 
other christs — or anointed, consecrated ones — in 
different ages of the world. The great truth of meta- 
physics, the dominating of the lower by the higher 
nature, was set forth by the Buddhas, who enlightened 
Asia; by Confucius, through whom wisdom was given 
to China; by Zoroaster, the great teacher of the Per- 
sians ; and by many other lights of the world. While 
the term " Christian " in its broad sense applies to all 
those who live in accordance with the Christ principle, 
yet the term "Buddhist" equally applies to them, and 
there is a narrower and usually understood sense in 
which the word Christian refers to the Jesus whose 
teachings are set forth in our Bible. 

The limitation implied by the term " Christian 
Science " excludes a portion of humanity from its fold. 
The Jew cannot favorably regard a science that claims to 
have been founded by our Christ, who is not to him the 
great teacher that he is to us. The Jew has not Christ ; 
but he has God, who is greater. There is also a class 



84 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OR, 

of enlightened human beings in Asia, among whom this 
science has never died or even slept, who would doubt- 
less prefer the term " Buddhistic Science " to "Christian 
Science," and who might, ages before our Christ came into 
existence, have thus named this science, which teaches 
dominion of the higher over the lower nature, through 
spiritual advancement. 

There is perhaps no term that better expresses meta- 
physical truth, than the term " Spiritual Science." 
" Spiritual Science " includes in its fold all spiritual 



There can be no discord between theosophy and 
metaphysics, for theosophy, which is wisdom concerning 
God and spiritual things, includes metaphysics. 

There is no discord between spiritualism and meta- 
physics. Metaphysics, as teaching the communion of 
mind with mind, irrespective of the physical body, is 
spiritualism. If metaphysics is consistent, it must in- 
clude spiritualism. We do not refer to that lower 
phase, that phenomenal spiritualism, which though use- 
ful as scientific experiment, endeavors only to materi- 
alize the spiritual world instead of spiritualizing the 
material world. 

Many are able to perceive that we bear a certain 
relation to one another in mind while here in the mate- 
rial body together, but cannot perceive that the rela- 
tion, which they acknowledge to be spiritual, remains 
the same after we all, or part of us, have cast off the 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 85 

material body. They acknowledge that the body bears 
no part in the action of mind upon mind, yet, with 
illogical blindness, they cannot see that the relation 
exists irrespective of the existence of the physical body. 
They feel that if a friend has cast off his material body, 
he has by that act severed the spiritual relation between 
himself and his friends in the body. They do not seem 
able to accept that mass of evidence in the New Testa- 
ment clearly proving the communion, communication, 
and manifestation of so-called departed spirits with 
spirits still embodied on earth, an evidence crowned 
with the great teaching of Jesus himself in his mani- 
festations to, and communion with, his disciples after he 
had cast aside his material body. 

If a dear friend can transfer his healing thought to 
your mind to-day while he is in the material body, why 
should he not continue the good work to-morrow, even 
though he may have cast aside that body ? Why should 
not your friend in the other life — as you call it — give 
you a mind treatment ? He did not leave his mind be- 
hind him, as a doctor leaves his medicine-case. If, as 
most of us believe to some extent, angels minister to us, 
it must be by means of mind, of spirit. If you cannot 
see that logical metaphysics includes spiritualism in its 
highest form, then you may be a metaphysician without 
it ; but if you do not hold yourself open to that or any 
other truth, you surely cripple your own powers. What 
you have not reached to-day, you may reach to-morrow. 



86 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OR, 

You have a great truth, if you see that God is the foun- 
tain of all good ; but you have more truth, if you not 
only see that God's work is perfect, but also see some 
of the means by which he works, for he always employs 
means in the working out of his law, whether you are 
able to see it or not. 

You are just as much being treated by minds out of 
the body, when you do not know it and do not believe 
it, as when you fully realize and acknowledge it. God's 
laws are not changed by our beliefs. If you denied the 
existence of air because you could not see it, you would 
none the less be breathing in that very air at the 
moment of your denial. Spirits do not come to us 
because we believe in them. They are here now, and 
always, whether we believe it or not. 

It is one thing not to know a truth, and quite another 
to endeavor to prove it false. Prejudice and false logic 
against something you do not know always displays 
ignorance instead of learning. The metaphysician who 
denies spiritualism, like the spiritualist who denies 
metaphysics, finds himself in an entanglement of incon- 
sistency. What he asserts with one breath he denies 
with the next. There are metaphysicians who adver- 
tise to give instruction that will destroy all belief in 
spiritualism. Perhaps a certain shallow belief in spirit 
communication, founded on the ipse dixit of some one 
else, or arrived at by logic only (for it is most logical), 
may be destroyed. But when this belief has become a 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 87 

knowledge to the individual soul, it is just as absurd to 
talk about destroying it, as it would be to talk about 
destroying a belief in the existence of the sun. Noth- 
ing could be more inconsistent than for metaphysicians 
who pretend to follow the teaching of Jesus the Christ 
to deny what he so plainly taught, and what they them- 
selves so frequently assert ; viz., that spirit can commu- 
nicate with spirit irrespective of the material organism ; 
and this is what they deny in denying spiritualism. 

There are certain minds that are so open to spiritual 
truth that they do not need to gain their knowledge in 
any external way. They are taught by an inward illu- 
mination, through the interior perception. Sometimes 
light breaks upon them from the pages of a book, or 
from some chance word, or from the atmosphere around 
them. We know of a lady who received such a flood 
of light on the truth of spiritual healing from the peru- 
sal of one of W. F. Evans' lofty works on the subject, 
that she became healed of a serious malady. We hear 
of others who say they received this truth in a single 
moment, directly from God ; that it was a revelation to 
them, a discovery made by them. Undoubtedly they 
did discover this truth. At whatever instant the truth 
enters into our soul, at that instant we make a discovery 
of it, and we must make a discovery of it before it 
becomes really ours and we can avail ourselves of it. 
We may have sat under much teaching concerning 
metaphysical truth, but it is of no use to us until the 



88 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS; OR, 

moment of our own discovery of it. It may come like 
a flash of lightning, or it may seem to break upon us 
ray by ray in a gradual illumination ; but in order to 
possess it, we must in some way make the discovery of 
it. As we are individual emanations from God, we 
must each have our own individual illumination. 

Those writers who attempt to prove logically that 
we have no individuality of soul, but are merged in 
one great universal ocean of spirit, find the idea so 
vague that it easily slips away from them. When 
they abuse this figure of speech, endeavoring to prove 
it literal truth, they find themselves on such yielding 
ground that if they fix the idea in one paragraph 
they are sure to uproot it in the next. We are parts 
of one universal spirit, as drops of the ocean are dis- 
tinct parts of one great body of water, yet none the 
less distinct drops. We are branches of the one vine, 
and depend for life and sustenance upon the vine 
from which we sprang. We are all one spirit, as the 
members of an organized society are one, — one in 
interest, one in purpose, — yet none the less distinct 
individual members of that body. We feel ourselves 
to be on a firm foundation of truth when we view 
ourselves as individual creations or thoughts of the 
Great Eternal Being, entities partaking of the essence 
of the Creator or " Over Soul," and which, like that 
Creator, will retain an individuality to all eternity. 
Jesus taught in parables; but instead of endeavoring 



THE TRUE METHOD OF HEALING. 89 

to prove them literally true, he explained them to 
his disciples as parables. 

There is much time misspent by certain metaphysi- 
cal teachers in censuring good which they mistake for 
evil, and such censure is confusing to the tyro in sci- 
ence. There is a great deal of misdirected thunder 
levelled at physiology, mistaking it for pathology. 

Now, a correct study of anatomy and physiology 
as publicly taught in schools, being sciences which 
explain the structure and functions of the material 
body in its normal condition of perfect health, can 
harm no one. Pathology is no more physiology than 
a treatise on potato rot is botany. If we are able 
to discern spirit, to discern God in nature, a study 
of nature is uplifting. If we are not able to discern 
God in nature, we probably should not discern Him 
even in His most wonderful work, — the mind of man, 
— but should regard thought as merely the result of 
atomic friction. 

As metaphysics works to correct the great error of 
of the age regarding disease in the material body, it 
does well to advise you to turn away from that body 
until you are so disciplined that you can regard it 
rightly. 

Botany is not considered a debasing science; yet if 
a botanist should become so inverted in mind that 
he failed to read God's perfect idea in plants, and 
could see a rose only with a corrupting worm at its 



90 PRACTICAL METAPHYSICS. 

heart, and regarded this corruption as a necessity of 
the plant in its development, then we should tell the 
botanist to turn away from his science altogether, 
until he was grounded in the truth of God's inten- 
tion regarding the vegetable world. 

So we tell the physiologist, if he cannot read God's 
intention concerning the material body, to turn away 
from that body altogether, until he is able to regard 
it rightly. The material body is no more matter than 
a flower or a rock. No material science should be 
debasing. No pure material science could be debas- 
ing. 

It is a great mistake to decry good as evil, instead 
of decrying the perversion of good, which is the only 
evil. 

In an age of reformation, however, good work is 
generally overdone. In religious reformations Pagan 
images are overthrown, and afterwards set up and re- 
stored, to decorate Christian churches. Tearing down 
must be done, even if we afterwards build up with 
a portion of the old material. 

The pendulum of science is now swinging from 
matter to spirit. When a pendulum reaches the ex- 
treme point, it must turn and come back again. When 
it finally stops, it is always at a central point. 

When great questions find their true basis and 
rest, they will always be midway between the two 
extremes. 



HEALTH FOR TEACHERS. 



By M. J. BARNETT. 



An Application of Metaphysics to Daily Life 
and Work. 



This practical little work is of great value to 
teachers in public and private schools, while it still 
further applies to brain workers of every class. Tracing 
the effect of the mind and spirit upon the body, it offers 
the true spiritual remedy for disease ; and, as prevention 
is better than cure, it teaches how to acquire such condi- 
tions of mind as shall protect one in health and thereby 
avoid the necessity of curing disease. It is of special 
service to both healers and patients. 



RETAIL PRICE, 25 CENTS. 



Sent by Mail, post-paid, on receipt of Retail Price. 



JUSTICE A HEALING POWER. 



By M. J. BARNETT. 



A Work enforcing the grand lesson of Pure Meta- 
physics that Virtue is a remedy for disease. 



A little treatise on the power of Justice to exert 
a beneficial influence over spiritual and material con- 
ditions. It regards Justice in its psychical aspect as a 
cause, and traces it down to effect in external mani- 
festations in the body. Its lesson is enforced by a nega- 
tive as well as a positive view of the subject. It is 
found beneficial in the class-room and office of the healer, 
as well as in the home of the patient. 



RETAIL PRICE, 25 CENTS. 



Sent by Mail, post-paid, on receipt of Retail Price. 



The New Biology. 



By M. J. Barnett. 



The Life Principle Traced Back to its True 
Origin in Spirit, 



The various practical lessons in the science of true 
thinking and true living, set forth in this book, renders 
it a valuable addition to the many useful works by the 
same author. Applying this knowledge, as it does, to 
all conditions of our earthly existence, and furnishing 
numberless apt illustrations, it appeals to a large class 
of the public. 



RETAIL PRICE, $1.00. 



Sent by Mail, postpaid, on receipt of retail price. 



THE DIVINE LAW OF CURE. 

By W. F. EVANS. 

A Standard Work on the Philosophy and Practice of 

the Mind Cure, a Reliable Text-Book in all 

the Schools of Mental Healing. 



No work has ever been written of more practical value 
to physicians of all schools. The book is the result of the 
extensive learning and research of the author and exhibits 
a familiarit}' with the literature of the subject. It is pro- 
foundly religious without being offensively dogmatic. It 
has been received with universal favor by all who are 
seeking light on the subject on which it treats — the cure 
of disease in ourselves and others by mental and spiritual 
agencies. 



Extra Cloth. 302 pp. Retail price, $1.50. 



Sent by mail, postpaid, on receipt of retail price. 



MENTAL MEDICINE: 

A THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL TREATISE ON MEDICAL 
PSYCHOLOGY. 

By W. F. EVANS. 

This book contains a full exposition of the nature and 
laws of Magnetism, and its application to the cure of dis- 
ease. 

Extra Cloth.. 216 pp. Retail Price, $1.25. 



Sent by mail, postpaid, on receipt of retail price. 



SOUL AND BODY; 

OR, 

THE SPIRITUAL SCIENCE OF HEALTH AND DISEASE. 

By W. F. EVANS. 



Extra Clotli. 147 pp. Retail Price, $1.00. 



Sent by mail, postpaid, on receipt of retail price. 



All the above works of Dr. Evans are on the relation of 
Miud and Body, and the cure of disease in ourselves and 
others by the mental method, and are the only publications 
on the subject that commend themselves to men of science 
and to thinking people everywhere. 



THE PRIMITIVE MIND CURE. 



The Nature and Power of Faith; 

OR, 

ELEMENTARY LESSONS IN CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY AND 
TRANSCENDENTAL MEDICINE. 

By W. F. EVANS, 
Author of "Divine Law of Cure," etc. 



This work is a complete exposition of the principles under- 
lying the system, of mental healing. It contains a full course 
of instruction in the philosophy and practice of the Mind 
Cure. It is the most complete treatise on Christian The- 
osophy, in its application to the cure of both soul and body 
that was ever published. It has elevated the subject into 
the dignity of a fixed spiritual science. 



Extra Cloth.. 225 pp. Retail Price, $1.50. 



B^gP Sent by mail, postpaid, on receipt of retail price. 








/;jK 



■ 



